Ciass 

Book_-. 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



6 



PHILOSOPHICAL UNION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 



THE 

CONCEPTION OF GOD: 

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNION 

BY 

JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., 

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
TOGETHER WITH 

COMMENTS THEREON 

BY 

SIDNEY EDWARD MEZES, Ph.D., 
HEAD OF THE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, 

JOSEPH LiCONTE, M.D., LL.D., 

PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 

AND 

G. H. HOWISON, M. A., LL.D., 
MILLS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SAME. 



BERKELEY: 
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE UNION, 
I8 95 . 



COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY 

G. H. HOWISON, President. 



/ 



3- 0 

"~6 1 f J 



UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 



PHILOSOPHICAL UNION, 

BULLETIN NO. 1 5. 

ty 

PROCEEDINGS AT THE MEETING OF AUGUST 30, 1895, 
ON OCCASION OF PROFESSOR ROYCE'S VISIT 
TO SUPPLEMENT HIS BOOK ON THE 
RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF 
PHILOSOPHY. 



PROGRAMME. 

I. Introductory Remarks by the President of the Union. 

II. Address by Professor Royce, of Harvard University, on 
The Conception of God. ^ 

III. Remarks on the Address, by Professor Sidney Edward 
Mezes, of the University of Texas. 

IV. Further Remarks on the Address, by Professor Joseph 
Le Conte. 

V. The President's Concluding Remarks. 



The Fifty-second Regular Meeting of the Union was held in 
the Harmon Gymnasium, in the University Grounds, on the evening 
of Friday, August 30, 1895. The members, past and present, 
together with their invited friends, officials of the State, ministers of 



2 FIFTY-SECOND REGULAR MEETING '. PROCEEDINGS. 

religion, men of letters and of science, Regents of the University, 
members of all the University Faculties, graduates and undergradu- 
ates of the same, and the general public, formed an assemblage of 
some fifteen hundred persons, filling the auditorium to its entire 
capacity, even of standing-room. Numbers of those whom the 
unusual interest of the occasion brought to the doors were unable 
to gain entrance, and, much to the regret of the Executive Council, 
had to be turned away. 

A few minutes before eight o'clock, the members of the Coun- 
cil, with their specially invited guests, proceeded to the platform. 
The President of the Union took the chair, having on his imme- 
diate right the principal speaker of the evening, Professor Royce, 
and directly on his left the other speakers, Professor Joseph 
Le Conte and Professor Mezes. At the right front of the plat- 
form were Dr. Kellogg, President of the University, Regents 
Bartlett and Houghton, and Secretary Bonte. Other guests 
on the platform were Professor Mooar, of the Pacific Theological 
Seminary; Professors Barnes and Griggs, of Stanford University; 
Superintendent Wilkinson, of the State Institution for the Deaf 
and the Blind; W. P. Gibbons, M. D., of Alameda; Edward 
Probert, Esq., of San Francisco; Professors Soule, Hilgard, 
Stringham, Slate, Bradley, Clapp and Merrill, and Asso- 
ciate Professor Lange, of the University; Mr. W. N. Friend, 
President of the Associated Students; E. N. Henderson, M. A., 
former Fellow in Philosophy; and Mr. J. D. Burks, ex-Secretary of 
the Council. 

At eight o'clock, precisely, the President called the meeting to 
order, the exercises were begun forthwith, and were continued, with 
the close attention of the audience, until the adjournment at a quar- 
ter before eleven. 



THE PROCEEDINGS IN FULL. 



THE PRESIDENT'S INTRODUCTORY REMARKS. 



Mr. President of the University, Regents, Faculties, Graduates and 
Undergraduate s, and Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The members of the Union, to whose meeting it is my agree- 
able duty to welcome you all, regard this occasion with a glad 
elevation of mind. And I am sure that in the presence of this great 
assemblage, representative of every interest that is highest and 
noblest in the Commonwealth of California, and come together to 
express its sympathy with this evening's intellectual and spiritual 
business, this gladness has not merely its excuse but its full justi- 
fication. To the members of the Union the occasion is auspicious; 
it marks the beginning of fulfilment in a plan for some years cher- 
ished. This meeting is only the first in an intended series of similar 
assemblies; a series which we hope, perhaps somewhat fondly, may 
continue year after year as long as the University shall last. We 
hope that henceforward, at the season of each Commencement, 
some person of eminent attainments in philosophy will visit us, and 
address us upon some great theme of human concern, as our prin- 
cipal speaker is about to do to-night. And we are able to assure 
you that, in all probability, this hope will be realized at the next 
Commencement at least. Our next annual speaker has given us 
his definite acceptance, and we can assure you beforehand of his 
preeminent standing. Do you but second us in our undertaking, 
and we are certain of its permanent and successful continuance. 

At a time like this, then, a word or two regarding our Union 
itself will be in place. It was founded some six years ago, by a 
group of young men and young women whom the study of philo- 
sophy in the University had so deeply interested that they wished 
for some medium whereby they could promote its farther pursuit by 
themselves and its introduction among others. They stated the 
objects of the Union as ' 1 the improvement of the members in the 



4 



INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT. 



knowledge of philosophy, the increase of its control over their 
aims and conduct, the formation of a definite bond among them, 
. . . the awakening of interest in philosophy . . . among 
all persons on whom they can exert an influence, and . . . the 
maintenance, at the seat of the University, of a central association 
for philosophical study and discussion." For these objects, the 
Union is organized with four classes of members — Corporate, Asso- 
ciate, Corresponding, and Honorary. The corporate and associate 
members are its active contributors, who do its work and supply its 
means. Its honorary members are "persons distinguished for their 
services to philosophy, either as thinkers or as benefactors," and it 
has thus far never had but one — the honored Founder of the chair of 
philosophy in the University, by whose munificent endowment alone 
it was that philosophical studies were set up there, and the existence 
and continuance of the Union itself made possible. Gratefully, 
therefore, do its members cherish the name and the character of 
Mr. D. O. Mills, — the plain and honorable and solid man of com- 
mercial affairs who has found time and conviction to believe in 
the affairs of the mind, and to endow, if we may borrow his own ever- 
memorable words, "the studies that, in their large sense, underlie 
laws, manners and religion, and in effect form the public opinion of 
the world." It was with peculiar pleasure that we of the Union 
expected his presence here to-night, and our disappointment is 
great that a slight indisposition has prevented him from coming. 
Fortunately, his portrait hangs at the rear of the platform, and we 
are glad that this large and sympathetic company can thus look 
upon his features. Long life, and health and happiness, to Mr. Mills! 

Corresponding members of the Union are ' ' persons residing at 
a distance from the University, who have attained some distinction 
in philosophical studies, and whose advice and cooperation, by cor- 
respondence or otherwise, are expected from time to time." Natu- 
rally, our principal speaker of this evening, our own brilliant alumnus, 
was the first person appointed a Corresponding Member; though 
he is not the only one, but has several distinguished associates. 
He resides "at a distance from the University" indeed; and his 
coming hither is literally a pilgrimage, across three thousand miles 
of continent, in fulfilment of his duties, as our constitution sets 
them forth. 

These duties are, to help. the Union in its proper pursuits; that 



NATURE AND CHIEF TOPICS OF PHILOSOPHY. 



5 



is, in its studies of philosophy. To many of you, perhaps, that 
statement tells next to nothing; for you, it may be, philosophy is a 
barren word, possibly a repellent word, — surrounded by a cloudy 
uncertainty, and conveying only the vaguest meaning; perchance it 
is your name for impenetrable obscurity. But it need not be so; it 
ought not to be so. In fact, philosophy when justly put before 
one is a very plain and obvious business, and the most important 
business of all. It has been nobly and justly defined by Bishop 
Berkeley as Nothing else but the study of wisdom and truth. The 
definition would be quite complete if it only went on to specify, 
exactly, the objects, the characteristic truths, that are studied; and 
this is done for us, perfectly, in the famous formula of Kant — God, 
Freedom, and Immortality. The Union has pursued these themes 
as diligently as its time and its opportunities have permitted; though, 
thus far, it has been concerned almost wholly with the first and the 
last of them, touching upon the second only incidentally and super- 
ficially. And for the three years just passed, it has been working 
more and more steadily and carefully toward the sublime subject, 
the awful problem, that together are to occupy us to-night — the Con- 
ception of God, and the Existence of God. Never can these 
questions grow outworn, so long as men remain truly men; and 
never did they have more an enchaining or more nearly a tragic 
interest in any age than now they have in ours: — What is really 
meant by that world-old ideal called God? And is there — is there 
— any Real Being matching it ? 

And now, ladies and gentlemen, it is my fortunate privilege to 
present to you our chief speaker for this meeting, who has come so 
far to tell us his answers to these questions. He deserves our best 
attention, on every ground. I present him to you all, members of 
the Union and friends from the general public, as a writer of deserved 
mark on Religious Philosophy, whose words in this matter have 
won attention from the best qualified minds in all parts of the culti- 
vated world. 

Next, and gladly, I present him to you, citizens of California, 
as a Native Son, — in whom you may take a just and a secure pride; 
for he has really done something, to which the serious world gives 
weight, toward taking away the reproach so often cast upon us by 
those who only see us from afar — the undeserved reproach of living 
wholly for the senses, and doing nothing for the spiritual interests of 



6 



PRESENTATION OF PROFESSOR ROYCE J HIS ADDRESS. 



man. I present him to you as a son who has won the ear of philo- 
sophic Europe, as well as of America, by his subtle and penetrating 
thinking on the profoundest and darkest problems of life. 

Last, and with chief satisfaction, I present him to you, authori- 
ties, graduates, and undergraduates of the University, as a type of 
the truest product of your university life and your university work. 
He has given his life to thought — to that study of wisdom and 
truth, of God, of Freedom, and of Immortality, which assuredly it is 
the final aim of all true university training to promote; and he has 
proved that your training can not only pass muster in the highest 
chair of the oldest and most famous seat of learning in the country, 
but can adorn it. 

Ladies and gentlemen, — Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard 
University. 



THE ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE, ON THE 
CONCEPTION OF GOD. 



I cannot begin the discussion of this evening without heartily 
thanking first of all my friend the presiding officer, and then the 
members of the Philosophical Union, for the kindness which has 
given to me the wholly undeserved and the very manifold privileges 
which this occasion involves for the one whom your invitation 
authorizes to lead the way in the discussion. It is a privilege to 
meet again many dear friends. It is a great privilege to be able to 
bring with me to my old home, as I do, the warm academic greet- 
ings of Harvard to my Alma Mater. It is an uncommon oppor- 
tunity to encounter in a discussion of this sort my honored 
colleagues who are to-night of your company. And there is 
another privilege involved for me in this occasion, which I must not 
omit to mention. I come here as a former student, to express as 
well as I can, by means of my poor performance of the present 
academic task, my thanks to the teachers who guided me in under- 
graduate days. It is the simplest duty of piety to them to say how 
I rejoice to be able to see, in this way, those of them who are still 
here, and with us to-night. Nor can I forbear, in this brief word of 
personal confession, to express with what especial earnestness of 
gratitude I come to-night into the presence of one of your number, 



THE ADDRESS AND ITS AUTHOR'S FIRST BOOK. 



7 



and one of my former teachers, whose lectures and whose counsel 
were to me, in my student days, especially a source of light, of 
guidance, and of inspiration. This teacher it was, I may say, who 
first set before me, in living presence, the ideal, still to me so 
remote, of the work of the thinker; and whenever since, in my 
halting way, I have tried to think about central problems, I have 
remembered that ideal of my undergraduate days, — that light and 
guidance and inspiration, — and the beloved teacher too, whose living 
presence in those days meant the embodiment of all these things. 
It is a peculiar delight, ladies and gentlemen, — a wholly undeserved 
boon, — to have this opportunity to come face to face, in your 
presence, with Professor Le Conte, and to talk with you, and with 
him, of questions that are indeed often called vexed questions, but 
that he first of all taught me to regard with the calmer piety and 
gentleness of the serious reason. 

I. 

I have been asked to address the Philosophical Union upon 
some aspects of the problem of Theism. During the past year the 
Union has been devoting a very kind attention to a volume en- 
titled The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, which I printed more 
than ten years ago. Were there time, I should be glad indeed if I 
were able to throw any direct light either upon that little book or 
upon your own discussions of its arguments. But, as a fact, my 
time in your presence is very short. The great problems of 
philosophy are pressing. I can do you more service on this 
occasion, if I devote myself to a somewhat independent confession 
of how the problems of philosophical Theism look to me to-day, 
than I could do if I took up your time with an effort to expound or 
defend a text which, as I frankly confess, I have not read with any 
care or connectedness since I finished the proof-sheets of the book in 
question. A man may properly print a philosophical essay for 
several reasons, taken in combination; namely, because he believes 
in it, and also because he wants to get himself expressed, and, finally, 
because he wants to get freed from the accidents of just this train of 
thought. But, on the other hand, no philosophical student is ever 
persuaded of his opinions merely because he has formerly learned 
to believe them, or because he has once come to express them. 
The question for the philosophical student always is : How does the 



8 NO RIGHT CONCEPTION OF GOD BUT BY PROOF OF HIS BEING. 

truth appear to me now, with the best reflection that I can at present 
give ? Past expression is therefore no substitute for present effort in 
philosophy. The very essence of philosophy is an unconcern for 
every kind of tradition, just in so far as it has become to the indi- 
vidual student mere tradition. For while the contents of any tra- 
dition may be as sacred as you please, the traditional form, as such, 
is the very opposite of the philosophical form. A tradition may 
be true; but only a present and living insight can be philosophical. 
If this is the case with any tradition — even a sacred tradition — it is 
above all the case with the very poor and perhaps, if you will, 
very profane sort of tradition that an individual student of philo- 
sophy may find in the shape of a past piece of his own writing. 
It is the death of your philosophizing, if you come to believe any- 
thing merely because you have once maintained it. And therefore 
I am not unwilling to confess that, if I had to-night to pass an ex- 
amination upon the text of my book, I might very possibly get an 
extremely poor mark. Let us lay aside then, for the moment, both 
text and tradition, and come face to face with our philosophical 
problem itself. 

The Conception of God — this is our immediate topic. And I 
begin its consideration by saying that, to my mind, a really fruitful 
philosophical study of the conception of God is inseparable from an 
attempt to estimate what evidence there is for the existence of God. 
When one conceives of God, one does so because one is interested, 
not in the bare definition of a purely logical or mathematical notion, 
but in the attempt to make out what sort of real world this is in 
which you and I live. If it is worth while even to speak of God 
before the forum of the philosophical reason, it is so because one 
hopes to be able, in a measure, to translate into articulate terms the 
central mystery of our existence, and to get some notion about 
what is at the heart of the world. Therefore when to-night I speak 
of the conception of God, I mean to do so in the closest relation to 
a train of thought concerning the philosophical proof that this con- 
ception corresponds to some living Reality. It is useless in this 
region to define, unless one wishes to show that, corresponding to the 
definition, there is a reality. And, on the other hand, the proof 
that one can offer for God's presence at the heart of the world con- 
stitutes also the best exposition that one can suggest regarding 
what one means by the conception of God. 



OMNISCIENCE THE CRITERION OF DEITY; ITS DEFINITION. 9 

Yet, of course, some preliminary definition of what one has in 
mind when one uses the word God is of value, since our proof will 
then involve a development of the fuller meaning of just this pre- 
liminary definition. For this preliminary purpose, I propose to 
define, in advance, what we mean under the name God, by means 
of using what tradition would call one of the Divine Attributes. I 
refer here to what has been called the attribute of Omniscience, or 
of the Divine Wisdom. By the word God I shall mean, then, in 
advance of any proof of God's existence, a being who is conceived 
as possessing to the full all logically possible knowledge, insight, 
wisdom. Our problem, then, becomes at once this: Does there 
demonstrably exist an Omniscient Being? or is the conception of an 
Omniscient Being, for all that we can say, a bare ideal of the 
human mind? 

Why I choose this so-called attribute of Omniscience as con- 
stituting for the purposes of this argument the primary attribute 
of the Divine Being, students of philosophy (who remember, for 
instance, that the Aristotelian God, however his existence was 
proved, was defined by that thinker principally in terms of the attri- 
bute of Omniscience) will easily understand, and you, as members 
of this Union and readers of my former discussion, will perhaps 
especially comprehend. But, for the present, let this selection of 
the attribute of Omniscience, as giving us a preliminary definition 
of God, appear, if you will, as just the arbitrary choice of this 
address. What we here need to see from the outset, however, is that 
this conceived attribute of Omniscience, if it were once regarded as 
expressing the nature of a real being, would involve as a conse- 
quence the concurrent presence, in such a being, of attributes that 
we could at pleasure express under other names; such, for instance, 
as what is rationally meant by Omnipotence, by Self-consciousness, 
by Self-possession — yes, I should unhesitatingly add, by Goodness, 
by Perfection, by Peace. For, consider for an instant what must be 
meant by Omniscience if one undertakes for a moment to view an 
omniscient being as real. 

An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented 
to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed pro- 
cesses of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct, and 
transparent insight into his own truth — who found thus presented 
to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely 



IO OMNISCIENCE AS SUM OF ANSWERS TO ALL POSSIBLE QUESTIONS. 

rational question. Observe the terms used. I say, the answer to 
every question. The words are familiar. Consider their meaning. 
We mortals question. To question involves thinking of possible 
facts, or of what one may call possible experiences, that are not 
now present to us. Thinking of these conceived or possible experi- 
ences that we do not now possess, we question in so far as we ask 
either what it would be possess them, or whether the world is such 
that, under given conditions, these experiences that we think of 
when we question could be presented to us. In other words, to 
question means to have ideas of what is not now present, and to ask 
whether these ideas do express, or could express, what some experi- 
ence would verify. I question, on the country road, "Is it four 
miles to the railway station, or more, or less? " In this case I have 
ideas or thoughts about possible experiences not now present to me. 
I question in so far as I wonder whether these possible experiences, 
if I got them — that is, if I walked or rode to yonder railway station 
and measured my way — would fulfil or verify one or another of 
these my various thoughts or ideas about the distance. To be limited 
to mere questions, then, — and here is the essential point about ques- 
tioning, — involves a certain divorce between your ideas and their 
objects, between facts conceived and facts directly experienced, be- 
tween what you think about and what you regard as possibly to 
be presented to your direct experience. In this divorce of idea or 
thought and experience or fact, lies the essence of the state of mind 
of a being who merely questions. 

On the other hand, to answer to the full, and with direct in- 
sight, any question, means to get your ideas, just in so far as they 
turn out to be true ideas, fulfilled, confirmed, verified by your ex- 
periences. When with full and complete insight you answer a 
question, then you get into the direct presence of facts, of experi- 
ences, which you behold as the confirmation or fulfilment of cer- 
tain ideas, as the verification of certain thoughts. Take your 
mere ideas, as such, alone by themselves, and you have to ques- 
tion whether or no they are true accounts of facts. Answer your 
questions, wholly for yourself, without intermediation, and then you 
have got your ideas, your thoughts, somehow into the presence of 
experienced facts. There are thus two factors or elements in com- 
pleted and genuine knowing, namely: fact, or something experi- 
enced, on the one hand; and mere idea, or pure thought about 



OMNISCIENCE AS UTTER UNION OF THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE. 1 1 

actual or possible experience, on the other hand. Divorce those 
two elements of knowledge, let the experienced fact, actual or pos- 
sible, be remote from the idea or thought about it, and then the 
being who merely thinks, questions, and, so far, can only question. 
His state is such that he wonders: Is my idea true? But let the 
divorce be completely overcome, and then the being who fully 
knows answers questions in so far as he simply sees his ideas ful- 
filled in the facts of his experience, and beholds his experiences as 
the fulfilment of his ideas. 

Very well, then, an omniscient being is denned as one in 
whom these two factors of knowledge, so often divorced in us, are 
supposed to be fully and universally joined. Such a being, I have 
said, would behold answered, in the facts present to his experi- 
ence, all rational, all logically possible questions. That is, for him, 
all genuinely significant, all truly thinkable ideas, would be seen as 
directly fulfilled, and fulfilled in his own experience. 

The two factors of his knowledge would, however, still remain 
distinguishable. He would think, or have ideas — richer ideas than 
our present fragments of thought, I need not say; but he would 
think. And he would experience. That is, he would have, in per- 
fect fulness, what we call feeling — a world of immediate data of con- 
sciousness, presented as facts. This his world of feeling, of 
presented fact, would be richer than our fragments of scattered 
sensation, as I also need not say; but he would experience. Only 
— herein lies the essence of his conceived omniscience — in him and 
for him these facts would not be, as they often are in us, merely 
felt, but they would be seen as fulfilling his ideas; as answering 
what, were he not omniscient, would be his mere questions. 

But now, in us, our ideas, our thoughts, our questions, not 
merely concern what experienced facts might come to us through 
our senses, but also concern the value, the worth, the relations, 
the whole significance, ethical or aesthetic, of our particular ex- 
periences themselves. We ask : Shall I win success ? And the 
question implies the idea of an experience of success which we now 
have not. We ask : What ought I to do ? And the question in- 
volves the idea of an experience of doing, which we conceive as 
fulfilling the idea of right. Misfortune comes to us, and we ask : 
What means this horror of my fragmentary experience ? — why did 
this happen to me ? The question involves the idea of an experience 



12 OMNISCIENCE INCLUSIVE OF OMNIPOTENCE AND GOODNESS. 

that, if present, would answer the question. Now such an experience, 
if it were present to us, would be an experience of a certain passing 
through pain to peace, of a certain winning of triumph through 
partial defeat, of a certain far more exceeding weight of glory that 
would give even this fragmentary horror its place in an experience 
of triumph and of self-possession. In brief, every time we are 
weak, downcast, horror-stricken, alone with our sin, the victims of 
evil fortune or of our own baseness, we stand, as we all know, not 
only in presence of agonizing fragmentary experiences, but in 
presence of besetting problems, which in fact constitute the very 
heart of our calamity. We are beset by questions to which we now 
get no answers. Those questions could only be answered, those 
bitter problems that pierce our hearts with the keen edge of doubt 
and of wonder — when friends part, when lovers weep, when the 
lightning of fortune blasts our hopes, when remorse and failure 
make desolate the lonely hours of our private despair — such 
questions, such problems, I say, could only be answered if the 
flickering ideas then present in the midst of our darkness shone 
steadily in the presence of some world of superhuman experience, of 
which ours would then seem to be only the remote hint. Such 
superhuman experience might in its wholeness at once contain the 
answer to our questions, and the triumph over — yes, and through — 
our fragmentary experience. But, as we are, we can only question. 

Well, then, — if the divorce of idea and experience character- 
izes every form of our human consciousness of finitude, of weak- 
ness, of evil, of sin, of despair, — you see that omniscience, involving, 
by definition, the complete and final fulfilment of idea in experience, 
the unity of thought and fact, the illumination of feeling by com- 
prehension, would be an attribute implying, for the being who 
possessed it, much more than an universally clear but absolutely 
passionless insight. An omniscient being could answer your bitter 
Why? when you mourn, with an experience that would not simply 
ignore your passion. For your passion, too, is a fact. It is ex- 
perienced. The experience of the omniscient being would therefore 
include it. Only his insight, unlike yours, would comprehend it, 
and so would answer whatever is rational about your present 
question. 

This is what I mean by saying that the definition of God by 
means of the attribute of Omniscience would involve far more than 



OMNISCIENCE ABSOLUTENESS— ORGANIC SELF-COMPLETENESS. 13 

the phrase "mere omniscience" at first easily suggests. As a fact, 
in order to have the attribute of omniscience, a being would neces- 
sarily be conceived as essentially world-possessing, — as the source 
and principle of the universe of truth, — not merely as an external 
observer of a world of foreign truth. As such, he would be con- 
ceived as omnipotent, and also in possession of just such experience 
as ideally ought to be ; in other words, as good and perfect. 

So much, then, for the mere preliminary definition. To this defi- 
nition I should here add a word or two of more technical analysis. 
We mortals have an incomplete experience. This means that the ideas 
awakened in us by our experience far transcend what we are now 
able to verify. We think, then, of actual or of possible experience 
that is not now ours. But an omniscient being would have no gen- 
uine or logically permissible ideas of any experience actually be- 
yond his own or remote from his own. We express this by saying, 
technically, that an omniscient being would possess an Absolute 
Experience; that is, a wholly complete or self-contained experience, 
not a mere part of some larger whole. Again, the omniscient 
being would be, as we have said, a thinker. But we, as thinkers, 
are limited, both in so far as there is possible thought not yet 
attained by us, and in so far as we often do not know what ones 
amongst our thoughts or ideas have a genuine meaning, or corres- 
pond to what an absolute experience would fulfil. But the omniscient 
being would not be thus limited as to his thinking. Accordingly, he 
would possess what we may call an Absolute Thought; that is, a self- 
contained thought, sufficient unto itself, and needing no further com- 
ment, supplement, or correction. As the union of such an Absolute 
Thought and Absolute Experience, our omniscient being is techni- 
cally to be named simply The Absolute; that is, the being sufficient 
unto himself. Moreover, I should also say that the experience and 
thought of this being might be called completely or fully organized. 
For us, namely, facts come in a disjointed way, out of connection; 
and our thoughts, equally, seek a connection which they do not now 
possess. An omniscient being would have to have present to him- 
self all the conceivable relations amongst facts, so that in his world 
nothing would be fragmentary, disunited, confused, unrelated. To 
the question, What is the connection of this and this in the world? 
the omniscient being would simply always find present the fulfilled 
answer. His experience, then, would form one whole. There would 



14 DOES THERE REALLY EXIST AN OMNISCIENT BEING? 

be endless variety in this whole, but the whole, as such, would fulfil 
an all-embracing unity, a single system of ideas. This is what I 
mean by calling his Experience, as we here conceive it, an absolutely 
organized experience, his Thought an absolutely organized thought. 

And now our question returns. We have defined the omnis- 
cient being. The question is: Does such a being exist ? We 
turn from the ideal to the hard fact that we mortals find ourselves 
very ignorant beings. What can such as we are hope to know of 
The Absolute? 

II. I 

Yes, the vast extent of our human ignorance, the limitations 
of our finite knowledge, — these great facts, so familiar to the pres- 
ent generation, confront us at the outset of every inquiry into our 
knowledge about God, or about any absolute issue. So little am I 
disposed to neglect these great facts of our limitation, that, as per- 
haps you will remember from the book that you studied, philoso- 
phy seems to me, primarily, to be as much the theory of human 
ignorance as it is the theory of human knowledge. In fact, it is a 
small thing to say that man is ignorant. It is a great thing to un- 
dertake to comprehend the essence, the form, the implications, the 
meaning, of human ignorance. Let us make a beginning in this 
task as we approach the problem of Theism. For my thesis to- 
night will be that the very nature of human ignorance is such that 
you cannot conceive or define it apart from the assertion that there 
is, in truth, at the heart of the world, an Absolute and Universal In- 
telligence, for which thought and experience, so divided in us, are 
in complete and harmonious unity. 

" Man is ignorant," says one, "ignorant of the true nature of 
reality. He knows that in the world there is something real, but 
he does not know what this reality is. The Ultimate Reality can 
therefore be defined, from our human point of view, as something 
unknowable." Here is a thesis nowadays often and plausibly 
maintained. Let me remind you of one or two of the customary 
arguments for this thesis — a thesis which, for us on this occasion, 
shall constitute a sort of first attempt at a definition of the nature of 
our human ignorance. 

All that we know or can know, so the defenders of this thesis 
assert, must first be indicated to us through our experience. With- 
out experience, without the element of brute fact thrust upon us in 



OUR UNDENIABLE IGNORANCE SEEMS TO EXCLUDE ANSWER. 15 

immediate feeling, there is no knowledge. Now, so far, as I must 
at once assure you, I absolutely accept this view. This is true, and 
there is no escape from the fact. Apart from — that is, in divorce 
from — experience there is no knowledge. And we can come to know 
only what experience has first indicated to us. I willingly insist that 
philosophy and life must join hands in asserting this truth. The 
whole problem of our knowledge, whether of nature, of man, or of 
God, may be condensed into the one question: What does our 
experience indicate ? But, to be sure, experience, as it first comes 
to us mortals, is not yet insight. Feeling is not yet truth. The 
problem : What does our experience indicate ? implies in its very 
wording that the indication is not the result. And between the in- 
dication and the truth that experience indicates there actually lies 
the whole travail of the most abstruse science. 

But the partisans of our present thesis continue their parable 
thus : This being true, — experience being the life blood of our 
human knowledge, — it is a fact that our human experience is de- 
termined by our peculiar organization. In particular, the specific 
energies of our sensory nerves determine our whole experience of 
the physical world. The visual centres get affected from without 
only in such wise that sensations of light accompany their excite- 
ment. The auditory centres respond to sensory disturbance only 
in such wise that we hear sounds. The physical fact beyond us 
never gets directly represented in our mental state ; for between the 
physical fact and our experience of its presence lie the complex con- 
ditions that give our sensations their whole specific character. And 
what is true of our sensations is true of the rest of our experience. 
As it comes to us, this experience is our specific and mental way of 
responding to the stimulations which reality gives us. This whole 
specific way therefore represents, not the true nature of outer 
reality, so much as the current states of our own organizations. 
Were the outer reality, as it exists not for our senses but in itself, to 
be utterly altered, still our experience, so long as one supposed our 
organization itself somehow to survive in a relatively unchanged 
form, might retain very many of its present characters — so many, in 
fact, that we need not necessarily suspect the metaphysical vastness 
of the change. On the other hand, if even a very slight cause, such 
as the inhaling of a little nitrous oxide or chloroform, chances to alter 
some essential process in the organization upon which our specific 



1 6 BUT AGNOSTICISM IMPLIES A KNOWLEDGE TRANSCENDING IT. 



sort of experience depends, then at once our whole immediate ex- 
perience undergoes a vast change, and it is as if our world came to 
an end, and a new world began. Yet the metaphysically real altera- 
tion of the universe in such a case may be almost inappreciable. 

Thus, then, our experience changes with the current states of 
our own organizations, rather than reveals the reality beyond ; and 
this reality beyond, as it is in itself, remains unknowable. So far 
the well-known and popular argument for agnosticism, as to every 
form of absolute truth. 



This first definition of the nature of our ignorance is a very 
familiar one in the present day. It is a definition that contains, but 
also, as I must add, conceals, a great deal of truth. I do not know 
how many times or in how many forms you may meet with it in 
current literature. You often seem to be meeting it everywhere. I 
regard it, however, as a statement of a truth in a form so confused 
as to be almost useless without revision. 

And first, let me ask, when one thus laments our ignorance of 
the supposed Absolute Reality, what it is that he desires as his un- 
attainable goal, when he thus laments. You cannot rationally say 
^ "I lack," without being properly called upon to define, in some 
intelligible terms, what you suppose yourself to be lacking. And 
I know not how the present question can be answered, unless thus : 
That which man now lacks, in so far as he is ignorant of the Absolute 
Reality, is logically definable as a possible, but to us unattainable, 
sort of experience ; namely, precisely an experience of what reality 
is. And I lay stress upon this view in order simply to point out 
that our ignorance of reality cannot mean an ignorance of some 
object that we can conceive as existing apart from any possible ex- 
perience or knowledge of what it is. What you and I lack, when 
we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and 
logically possible state of mind, or type of experience; to wit, a state 
of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had ful- 
filled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the 
knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call 
the Absolute Reality. 

i Let us remember, then, this first simple insight: That our igno- 
rance of the Absolute Reality can mean only that there is some sort 
of possible experience, some state of mind, that you and I want, but 



III. 



KNOWN ERROR OF SENSES IMPLIES TRUTH OF HIGHER EXPERIENCE. I'J 

that we do not now possess. And next let us proceed to ask why it 
is that the foregoing popular argument for our human ignorance has 
seemed to us so convincing, — as it usually does seem. Why is it 
that when men say: 11 You are confined to your sensations, and your 
sensations never reveal to you the external physical realities as they 
are in themselves," this argument seems so crushing, this exposure 
of our human fallibility so impressive ? 

To this question I answer, that, as a fact, the argument just stated 
from the physiology of the senses convinces us of our human 
fallibility and ignorance so persuasively, only because, in the concrete 
application of this argument, we actually first assume that we have 
a real knowledge, not, to be sure, of ultimate truth, but of a truth 
known to us through a higher experience than that of our senses; 
namely, the experience of that very science of the physiology of the 
senses which is relied upon to prove our total ignorance. When 
compared with this assumed higher form of indirect experience, or 
scientific knowledge, the direct experience of the senses does indeed 
seem ignorant and fallible enough. For the foregoing argument 
depends upon the supposition that we do know very well what we 
mean by the physical states of our organisms, and by the physical 
events outside of us. And the thesis involved is, in this aspect, 
simply the doctrine that any given groups of sensations, e. g. , those 
of color, of temperature, or of odor, are inadequate indications of 
the otherwise known or knowable physical properties of the bodies 
that affect us when we see or feel or smell in their presence. On 
this side, then, I insist, the doctrine that our sensory experience is 
dependent upon the physical states of our organism, is a doctrine 
expressive, not of our ignorance of any absolute reality (or Ding a?i 
szc/i), but of our knowledge of a phenomenal world. We happen 
to know, or at all events to believe that we know, concerning what 
our experience reveals and our science analyzes, viz., concerning 
the so-called physical world, so much, that we can actually prove the 
inadequacy of our current sensations to reveal directly, or to pre- 
sent to us, physical truths that our science otherwise, and more in- 
directly, well makes out. The relatively indirect experience of 
science can and does correct the existent and unconquerable momen- 
tary ignorance of our senses. Indirect insight proves to be better, 
in some ways, than immediate feeling. To use Professor James's 
more familiar terminology, we declare that we know about the phy- 



l8 DIRECT EXPERIENCE, AND INDIRECT OR ORGANIZED : THIS WISER. 

sical world more than we can ever grasp by direct acquai?itance with 
our sensations. And so, now, it is because we are supposed to know 
these things about the so-called reality, that we are aware of the 
limitations of our passing experiences. Thus viewed, the present 
statement of our limitations appears to be merely a correction of our 
narrower experience by the organized experience of our race and of 
our science. It tells us that we are ignorant, in one region of our 
experience, of what a wider experience, indirectly acquired, reveals 
to us. 

The physiology of the senses, then, rightly viewed, does not 
assert that all our human experience is vainly subjective, including 
the very type of experience upon which the sciences themselves are 
founded. What science says, is simply that there is a sort of in- 
direct and organized experience which reveals more of phenomenal 
truth than can ever be revealed to our direct sensory states as these 
pass by. But our popular doctrine of the Unknowable Reality uses 
this so-called ' ' verdict of science ' ' only by confounding it with a 
totally different assertion. The "verdict of science" is, that organ- 
ized experience indicates much phenomenal truth that the senses can 
never directly catch. The doctrine of the Unknowable Reality 
asserts that no human experience can attain any genuine truth, and 
then appeals to that aforesaid ' ' verdict ' ' to prove this result. But 
the sciences judge the ignorance of sense by comparing it with a 
knowledge conceived to be actually attained; namely, the knowledge 
of certain indirectly known physical phenomena as they really are, 
not to be sure as absolute realities, but as the objects of our organ- 
ized physical experience. You surely cannot use the proposition 
that organized experience is wiser than passing experience, to prove 
that no experience can give us any true wisdom. 

IV. 

Yet I said, a moment ago, that this popular conception of the 
nature of our human ignorance contains or, rather, conceals much 
truth. And this notion of the relative failure of every sort of merely 
immediate experience to reveal a truth at which it kindly hints, is a 
very instructive notion. Only, we plainly need to try a second 
time to define the nature of human ignorance in terms of this very 
contrast between a lower and a higher sort of experience. Let us 



IGNORANCE KNOWN IMPLIES COMPLETELY ORGANIZED EXPERIENCE. 1 9 

begin anew our analysis of this same significant problem of the 
nature and limits of knowledge. 

The fortune of our empirical science has been, that as we men 
have wrought together upon the data of our senses, we have grad- 
ually woven a vast web of what we call relatively connected, united, or 
organized knowledge. It is of this world, in its contrast with the 
world of our sensations, that I have just been speaking. Now, as 
we have just seen, this organized knowledge has a very curious 
relation to our more direct experience. In the first place, wher- 
ever this organized knowledge seems best developed, we find it un- 
dertaking to deal with a world of truth, of so-called reality, or at 
least of apparent truth and reality, which is very remote from the 
actual sensory data that any man of us has ever beheld. Our 
organized science, as many have pointed out ever since Plato's 
first naive but permanently important observations upon this topic, 
deals very largely with conceived — with ideal — realities that transcend 
actual human observation. Atoms, ether-waves, geological periods, 
processes of evolution — these are to-day some of the most import- 
ant constituents of our conceived phenomenal universe. Spatial 
relations, far more exactly describable than they are directly veri- 
fiable, mathematical formulae that express again the exactly describ- 
able aspects of vast physical processes of change, — such are the 
topics with which our exacter science is most immediately concerned. 
In whose sensory experience are such objects and relationships at 
all directly pictured? The ideal world of Plato, the product of a 
more elementary sort of infant science, was made up of simpler con- 
tents than these; but still, when thus viewed, our science does in- 
deed seem as if absorbed in the contemplation of a world of pure, 
yes, I repeat, of Platonic ideas. For such realities get directly pre- 
sented to no man's senses. 

But of course, on the other hand, we no sooner try to define 
the work of our science in these terms than we are afresh reminded 
that this realm of pure Platonic ideas would be a mere world of fan- 
tastic shadows if we had not good reason to say that these ideas, 
these laws, these principles, these ideal objects of science, remote as 
they seem from our momentary sensory experiences, still have a real 
and, in the end, a verifiable relation to actual experience. One uses 
the scientific conceptions because, as one says, one can verify their 
reality. And to verify must mean to confirm in sensory terms. 



20 HUMAN, NEVER THE COMPLETELY ORGANIZED EXPERIENCE. 

Only, to be sure, such verification always has to be for us men an 
extremely indirect one. The conceived realities of constructive 
science, atoms, molecules, ether-waves, geological periods, pro- 
cesses of change whose type is embodied in mathematical formulae — 
these are never directly presented to any moment of our verifying 
sensory experience. But nevertheless we say that science does 
verify these conceptions; for science computes that, if they are true, 
then, under given conditions, particular sensory experiences, of a 
predictable character, will occur in somebody's individual experi- 
ence. Such predictions trained observers can and do successfully 
undertake to verify. The verification is itself, indeed, no direct 
acquaintance with the so-called realities that the aforesaid Platonic 
ideas define. But it appears to involve an indirect knowledge about 
such realities. 

Yet our direct experience, as it actually comes, remains at best 
but a heap of fragments. And when one says that our science re- 
duces our experience to order, one is still talking in relatively ideal 
terms. For our science does not in the least succeed in effectively 
reducing this chaos of our finite sensory life to any directly pre- 
sented orderly wholeness. For think, I beg you, of what our 
concrete human experience is, as it actually comes, even at its best. 
Here we are all only too much alike. The sensory experience of a 
scientific man is, on the whole, nearly as full of immediately ex- 
perienced disorder and fragmentariness as is that of his fellow the 
layman. For the scientific student too, the dust of the moment 
flies, and this dust often fills his eyes, and blinds him with its whirl 
of chance almost as much as it torments his neighbor who knows 
no Platonic ideas. I insist : Science throughout makes use of the 
contrast between this flying experience, which we have and which we 
call an experience of unreality, and the ideal experience, the higher 
sort of organized experience which we have not, and which we call 
an experience of reality. Upon this contrast the whole confession 
of our human ignorance depends. Let us still dwell a little on this 
contrast. Remember how full of mere chance the experience of 
nearly every moment seems to be; and that, too, even in a laboratory; 
much more, in a day's walk or in a lecture-room. The wind that 
sighs; the cart or the carriage that rumbles by; yonder dress or 
paper that rustles; the chair or boot that squeaks; the twinge that 
one suddenly feels ; the confusions of our associative mental process, 



LATTER, WE ONLY SEE AS THROUGH A GLASS, — DARKLY. 21 

" fancy unto fancy linking;" the accidents that filled to-day's news- 
papers — of such stuff, I beg you to notice, our immediate experience 
is naturally made up. The isolating devices of the laboratory, the 
nightly silence of the lonely observatory, the narrowness of the 
microscopic field, and, best of all, the control of a fixed and well- 
trained attention, often greatly diminish, but simply cannot annul, 
the disorder of this outer and inner chaos. But, on the other hand, 
all such efforts to secure order rest on the presupposition that this 
disorder means fragmentariness — random selection from a world of 
data that our science aims to view indirectly as a world of orderly 
experience. But even such relative reduction of the chaos as we get 
never lasts long and continuously in the life of any one person. 
Your moments of unfragmentary and more scientific experience fill 
of themselves only fragments of your life. A wandering attention, 
the interruption of intruding sensations, — such fragments may at 
any time be ready, by their intrusion, to destroy the orderliness of 
even the best-equipped scientific experience. The student of science, 
like other men, knows in fragments, and prophesies in fragments. 
But — and here we come again in sight of our goal — the world of truth 
that he wants to know is a world where that which is in part is to be 
taken away. He calls that the world of an organized experience. 
But he sees that world as through a glass, — darkly. He has to 
ignore his and our ignorance whenever he speaks of such a world as 
if it were the actual object of any human experience whatever. As 
a fact, direct human experience, apart from the elaborately devised 
indirect contrivances of conceptual thought, knows nothing of it. 

But let us sum up the situation now before us. It is the 
very situation that our first statement of human ignorance, as de- 
pendent on our organization, tried to define. We now define afresh. 
All our actual sensory experience comes in passing moments, and is 
fragmentary. Our science, wherever it has taken any form, con- 
trasts with this immediate fragmentariness of our experience the 
assertion of a world of phenomenal truth, which is first of all 
characterized by the fact that for us it is a conceptual world, and not 
a world directly experienced by any one of us. Yet this ideal 
world is not an arbitrary world. It is linked to our actual experience 
by the fact that its conceptions are accounts, as exact as may be, of 
systems of possible experience, whose contents would be presented, 
in a certain form and order, to beings whom we conceive as including 



22 OUR IGNORANCE DEFINED ANEW, IN TERMS OF FATHOMED SCIENCE. 

our fragmentary moments in some sort of definite unity of experience. 
That these scientific accounts of this world of organized experience 
are true, at least in a measure, we are said to verify, in so far as we 
first predict that, if they are true, certain other fragmentary 
phenomena will get presented to us under certain definable condi- 
tions, and in so far as, secondly, we successfully proceed to fulfil 
such predictions. Thus all of our knowledge of natural truth de- 
pends upon contrasting our actually fragmentary and stubbornly 
chaotic individual and momentary experience with a conceived 
world of organized experience, inclusive of all our fragments, but 
reduced in its wholeness to some sort of all-embracing unity. The 
contents and objects of this unified experience, we discover, first, 
by means of hypotheses as to what these contents and objects are, 
and then by means of verifications which depend upon a successful 
retranslation of our hypotheses as to organized experience into terms 
which our fragmentary experience can, under certain conditions, 
once more fulfil. 

If, however, this is the work of all our science, then the con- 
ception of our human ignorance easily gets a provisional restate- 
ment. You are ignorant, in so far as you desire a knowledge that 
you cannot now get. Now, the knowledge you desire is, from 
our present point of view, no longer any knowledge of a reality 
foreign to all possible experience; but it is an adequate knowledge 
of the contents and the objects of a certain conceived or ideal sort 
of experience, called by you organized experience. And an organ- 
ized experience would be one that found a system of ideas fulfilled 
in and by its facts. This sort of knowledge you, as human being, 
can only define indirectly, tentatively, slowly, fallibly. And you 
get at it thus imperfectly, — why? Because your immediate experi- 
ence, as it comes, is always fleeting, fragmentary. This is the sort 
of direct knower that you are, — a being who can of himself verify 
only fragments. But you can conceive infinitely more than you 
can directly verify. In thought you therefore construct concep- 
tions which start, indeed, in your fragmentary experience, but 
which transcend it infinitely, and which so do inevitably run into 
danger of becoming mere shadows, — pure Platonic ideas. But you 
don't mean your conceptions to remain thus shadowy. By the 
devices of hypothesis, prediction, and verification, you seek to link 
anew the concept and the presentation, the ideal order and the 



THE CONCEPTIONS REALITY AND EXPERIENCE CORRELATIVE. 23 

stubborn chaos, the conceived truth and the immediate datum, the 
contents of the organized experience and the fragments of your 
momentary flight of sensations. In so far as you succeed in this 
effort, you say that you have science. In so far as you are always, 
in presented experience, limited to your chaos, you admit that 
your sensations are of subjective moment and often delude you. 
But in so far as your conceptions of the contents of the ideal organ- 
ized experience get verified, you say that you acquire the afore- 
said indirect knowledge of the contents of the ideal and organized 
experience. We men know all things through contrasts. It is the 
contrast of your supposed indirect knowledge of the contents of the 
ideal organized experience with your direct and actual, but frag- 
mentary passing experience, that enables you to confess your ignor- 
ance. Were you merely ignorant, you could not know the fact. 
Because you are indirectly assured of the truth of an insight that 
you cannot directly share, you accuse your direct experience of 
illusory fragmentariness. But in so doing you contrast the contents 
of your individual experience, not with any mere reality apart from 
any possible experience, but with the conceived object of an ideal 
organized experience — an object conceived to be present to that 
experience as directly as your sensory experiences are present to 
you. 

V. 

In the light of such considerations, our notion of the infinitely 
remote goal of human knowledge gets a transformation of a sort 
very familiar to all students of philosophical idealism. And this 
transformation relates to two aspects of our conception of knowledge, 
viz. : first, to our notion of what Reality is, and secondly to our no- 
tion of what we mean by that Organized Experience. In the first 
place, the reality that we seek to know has always to be defined as 
that which either is or would be present to a sort of experience 
which we ideally define as an organized — that is, an united and trans- 
parently reasonable — experience. We have, in point of fact, no con- 
ception of reality capable of definition except this one. In case of 
an ordinary illusion of the senses we often say: This object seems 
thus or so; but in reality it is thus. Now, here the seeming is op- 
posed to the reality only in so far as the chance experience of one 
point of view gets contrasted with what would be or might be experi- 



24 ABSOLUTE REALITY MEANS CONTENT OF ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE. 

enced from some larger, more rationally permanent, or more inclu- 
sive and uniting point of view. Just so, the temperature of the room 
seems to a fevered patient to vary thus or thus; but the real tem- 
perature remains all the while nearly constant. Here the seeming 
is the content of the patient's momentary experience. The real 
temperature is a fact that either is, or conceivably might be, present 
to a larger, a more organized and scientific and united experience, 
such as his physician may come nearer than himself to possessing. 
The sun seems to rise and set; but in reality the earth turns on its 
axis. Here the apparent movement of the sun is somewhat indi- 
rectly presented to a narrow sort of human experience. A wider 
experience, say an experience defined from an extra-terrestrial point 
of view, would have presented to it the earth's revolution as im- 
mediately as we now can get the sunrise presented to us. To con- 
ceive any human belief as false — say the belief of a lunatic, a fanatic, 
a philosopher, or of a theologian — is to conceive this opinion 
as either possibly or actually corrected from some higher point of 
viewy to which a larger whole of experience is considered as present. 

vPassing to the limit in this direction, we can accordingly say 
that by the absolute reality we can only mean either that which is 
present to an absolutely organized experience inclusive of all pos- 
sible experience, or that which would be presented as the content ^ 
of such an experience if there were one. If there concretely is 
such an absolute experience, then there concretely is such a reality 
present to it. If the absolute experience, however, remains to the 
end barely possible, then the concept of reality must be tainted 
by the same bare possibility. But the two concepts are strictly * 
correlated. To conceive, for instance, absolute reality as containing 
no God, means simply that an absolutely all-embracing experi- 
ence, if there were one, would find nothing Divine in the world. 
To assert that all human experience is illusory, is to say that an 
absolutely inclusive experience, if there were one, would have pres- 
ent, as part of its content, something involving the utter failure of 
our experience to attain that absolute content as such. To conceive 
that absolute reality consists of material atoms and ether, is to say 
that a complete experience of the universe would find presented to 
it nothing but experiences analogous to those that we have when 
we talk of matter in motion. In short, one must be serious with 
this concept of experience. Reality, as opposed to illusion, means 



WHAT, THEN, IS ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE? ORIGIN OF THIS IDEAL. 25 

simply an actual or possible content of experience, not in so far 
as this experience is supposed to be transient and fleeting, but in 
so far as it is conceived to be somehow inclusive and organized, 
the fulfilment of a system of ideas, the answer to a scheme of 
rational questions. 

It remains, however, to analyze the other member of our re- 
lated pair of terms, viz. : the conception of this organized sort of 
experience itself. In what sense can there be any meaning or 
truth about this conception ? 

VI. 

The conception of organized experience, in the limited and 
relative form in which the special sciences possess it, is unquestion- 
ably through and through a conception that, for us men, as we are, 
has a social origin. No man, if isolated, could develope the sort of 
thoughtfulness that would lead him to appeal from experience as it 
comes to him, to experience as it ideally ought to come, or would 
come, to him in case he could widely organize a whole world of 
experience in clear relation to a single system of conceptions. Man 
begins his intelligent life by imitatively appealing to his fellow's 
experience. The life-blood of science is distrust of individual 
belief as such. A common definition of a relatively organized ex- 
perience is, the consensus of the competent observers. Deeper than 
our belief in any physical truth is our common-sense assurance that 
the experience of our fellows is as genuine as our own, is in actual 
relation to our own, has present to it objects identical with those that 
we ourselves experience, and consequently supplements our own. 
Apart from our social consciousness, I myself should hold that we 
men, growing up as we do, can come to have no clear conception of 
truth, nor any definite power clearly to think at all. Every man 
verifies for himself. But what he verifies, — the truth that he be- 
lieves himself to be making out when he verifies, — this he conceives 
as a truth either actually or possibly verifiable by his fellow or by 
some still more organized sort of experience. And it becomes for 
him a concrete truth, and not a merely conceived possibility, pre- 
cisely so far as he believes that his fellow or some other concrete 
mind does verify it. 

My fellow's experience, however, thus supplements my own in 
two senses; namely, as actual and as possible experience. First, in 
so far as I am a social being, I take my fellow's experience to be as 



26 ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE THAT OF A UNIVERSAL SUBJECT. 

live and real an experience as is mine. In appealing to the consensus 
of other men's experiences, I am so far appealing to what I regard as 
a real experience other than my own momentary experience, and 
not as a merely possible experience. But in this sense, to be sure, 
human experience is not precisely an organized whole. Other men 
experience in passing moments, just as I do. Their consensus, in 
so far as it is reached, is no one whole of organized experience at 
all. But, on the other hand, the fact of the consensus of the various 
experiences of men, so far as such consensus appears to have been 
reached, suggests to our conception an ideal — the ideal of an ex- 
perience which should be not only manifold but united, not only 
possessed of chance agreements but reduced to an all-embracing 
connectedness. As a fact, this ideal is the one constantly used by 
anyone who talks of the "verdict of science." This significant 
whole and connected experience remains, to us mortals, a conceived 
ideal, always sought, never present. The ultimate question is: Is 
this conception a mere ideal ? — or does it stand for a genuine sort of 
concrete experience? The social origin of the conception, as we 
mortals have come to get it, suggests in an ambiguous way both 
alternatives. The experience to which, as a social being, I first 
appeal when I learn to talk of truth, is the live actual experience of 
other men, which I, as an imitative being, primarily long to share, 
and which I therefore naturally regard as in many respects the 
norm for my experience. In society, in so far as I am plastic, my 
primary feeling is that I ought, on the whole, to experience what 
the other men experience. But, in the course of more thoughtful 
mental growth, we have come to appeal from what the various men 
do experience to what they all ought to experience, or would ex- 
perience if their experience were in unity; that is, if all their 
moments were linked expressions of one universal meaning which 
was present to one Universal Subject, of whose insight their own 
experiences were but fragments. Such an ideally united experience, 
if it could but absolutely define its own contents, would know reality. 
And by reality we mean merely the contents that would be present 
to such an ideal unity of experience. But now, on this side, the con- 
ception of the ideally organized experience does indeed at first look 
like a mere ideal of a barely possible unity. The problem still is : 
Is this unity more than a bare possibility ? Has it any such concrete 
genuineness as the life of our fellows is believed to possess ? 



IS THERE, THEN, SUCH EXPERIENCE OF SUCH A SUBJECT? 27 

Observe, however, that our question: Is there any such real 
unity of organized experience? is precisely equivalent to the ques- 
tion : Is there, not as a mere possibility, but as a genuine truth, any 
reality? The question: Is there an absolutely organized experi- 
ence ? is equivalent to the question : Is there an absolute reality ? 
You cannot first say: There is a reality now unknown to us mor- 
tals, and then go on to ask whether there is an experience to which 
such reality is presented. The terms Reality and Organized Ex- 
perience are correlative terms. The one can only be defined as the 
object, the content of the other. Drop either, and the other van- 
ishes. Make one a bare ideal, and the other becomes equally such. 
If the organized experience is a bare and ideal possibility, then the 
reality is a mere seeming. If what I ought to experience, and 
should experience were I not ignorant, remains only a possibility, 
then there is no absolute reality, but only possibility, in the uni- 
verse, apart from your passing feelings and mine. Our actual issue, 
then, is: Does a real world ultimately exist at all? If it does, then 
it exists as the object of some sort of concretely actual organized 
experience, of the general type which our science indirectly and 
ideally defines, only of this type carried to its absolute limit of 
completeness. 

The answer to the ultimate question now before us — the ques- 
tion : Is there an absolutely organized experience ? — is suggested by 
two very significant considerations. Of these two considerations, 
the first runs as follows: 

The alternative to saying that there is such a real unity of 
experience is the assertion that such an unity is a bare and ideal 
possibility. But now there can be no such thing as a merely pos- 
sible truth, definable apart from some actual experience. To say: 
So and so is possible, is to say: There is, somewhere in experi- 
ence, an actuality some aspect of which can be defined in terms of 
this possibility. A possibility is a truth expressed in terms of a 
proposition beginning with if, or a hypothetical proposition, — an is 
expressed in terms of an if. But every hypothetical proposition 
involves a categorical proposition. Every if implies an is. For 
you cannot define a truth as concretely true unless you define it 
as really present to some experience. Thus, for instance, I can 
easily define my actual experience by expressing some aspect of it 
in the form of a supposition, even if the supposition were one con- 



28 I.— ITS BARE IDEALITY, HELD TRUE, IMPLIES ITS REALITY. 

trary to fact. But I cannot believe in the truth of a supposition 
without believing- in some concrete and experienced fact. The 
suitor asks for the daughter. The father replies : "I will give 
thee my daughter if thou canst touch heaven. ' ' Here the father ex- 
presses his actually experienced intention in the form of a hypo- 
thetical proposition each member of which he believes to be false. 
The suitor cannot touch heaven, and is not to. get the gift of the 
daughter. Yet the hypothetical proposition is to be true. Why ? 
Because it expresses in terms of an if what the father experiences 
in terms of an is, namely, the obdurate inner will of the forbidding 
parent himself. Just so with any if proposition. Its members, 
antecedent and consequent, may be false. But it is true only in 
case there corresponds to its fashion of assertion some real experi- 
ence. 

And now, to apply this thought to our central problem, you and 
I, whenever we talk of reality as opposed to mere seeming, assert 
of necessity, as has just been shown, that if there were an organized 
unity of experience, this organized experience would have present 
to it as part of its content the fact whose reality we assert. This 
proposition cannot, as a merely hypothetical proposition, have any 
real truth, unless, to its asserted possibility, there corresponds some 
actual experience, present somewhere in the world, not of barely 
possible, but of concretely actual experience. And this is the first 
of our two considerations. In fine, if there is an actual experience 
to which an absolute reality corresponds, then you can indeed 
translate this actuality into the terms of bare possibility. But unless 
there is such an actual experience, the bare possibility expresses no 
truth. 

The second consideration appears when we ask our finite ex- 
perience whereabouts, in its limited circle, is in any wise even sug- 
gested the actually experienced fact of which that hypothetical pro- 
position relating to the ideal or absolute experience is the expression. 
What in finite experience suggests the truth that if there were an 
absolute experience it would find a certain unity of facts ? 

VII. 

To this question, my answer is as follows : — Any finite experi- 
ence either regards itself as suggesting some sort of truth, or does 
not so regard itself. If it does not regard itself as suggesting truth, 



II.— ITS NON-EXISTENCE, SUPPOSED REAL, PRESUMES IT. 



2 9 



it concerns us not here. Enough, one who thinks, who aims at 
truth, who means to know anything, is regarding his experience as 
suggesting truth. Now to regard our experience as suggesting 
truth is, as we have seen, to mean that our experience indicates what 
a higher or inclusive i.e. a more organized experience would find 
presented thus or thus to itself. It is this meaning, this intent, this 
aim, this will to find in the moment the indication of what a higher 
experience directly grasps, — it is this that embodies for us the fact 
of which our hypothetical proposition aforesaid is the expression. 
But you may here say: " This aim, this will, is all. As a fact, you 
and I aim at the absolute experience; that is what we mean by 
wanting to know absolute truth ; but the absolute experience," so 
you may insist, ' ' is just a mere ideal. There need be no such ex- 
perience as a concrete actuality. The aim, the intent, is the known 
fact. The rest is silence, — perhaps error. Perhaps there is no 
absolute truth, no ideally united and unfragmentary experience." 

But hereupon one turns upon you with the inevitable dialectic 
of our problem itself. Grant hypothetically, if you choose, for a 
moment, that there is no universal experience as a concrete fact, 
but only the hope of it, the definition of it, the will to win it, the 
groaning and travail of the whole of finite experience in the search 
for it, in the error of believing that it is. Well, what will that 
mean? This ultimate limitation, this finally imprisoned finitude, 
this absolute fragmentariness and error of the actual experience that 
aims at the absolute experience when there is no absolute experience 
at which to aim, — this absolute finiteness and erroneousness of the 
real experience, I say, will itself be a fact, a truth, a reality, and, as 
such, just the absolute truth. But this supposed ultimate truth will^ 
exist for whose experience? For the finite experience? No, for 
although our finite experience knows itself to be limited, still, just in 
in so far as it is finite, it cannot know that there is no unity beyond 
its fragmentariness. For if any experience actually knew (that is, 
actually experienced) itself to be the whole of experience, it would 
have to experience how and why it were so. And if it knew this, 
it would be ipso facto an absolute i.e. a completely self-possessed 
experience, for which there was no truth that was not, as such, a 
datum, — no ideal of a beyond that was not, as such, judged by the 
facts to be meaningless, — no thought to which a presentation did 
not correspond, no presentation whose reality was not luminous to 



30 BARE IDEALITY OF ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE SELF-CONTRADICTORY. 

its comprehending thought. Only such an absolute experience 
could say with assurance : " Beyond my world there is no further 
experience actual.' ' But if, by hypothesis, there is to be no such 
an experience, but only a limited collection of finite experiences, the 
question returns : — The reality of this final limitation, the existence 
of no experience beyond the broken mass of finite fragments, — this 
is to be a truth, — but for whose experience is it to be a truth ? 
Plainly, in the supposed case, it will be a truth nowhere presented — 
a truth for nobody. But, as we saw before, to assert any absolute 
reality as real is simply to assert an experience — and, in fact, just in so 
far as the reality is absolute, an absolute experience — for which this 
reality exists. To assert a truth as more than possible, is to assert 
the concrete reality of an experience that knows this truth. Hence, 
— and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter — the very 
effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is 
a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving 
4 contradiction. Experience must constitute, in its entirety, one 
self-determined and consequently absolute and organized whole. 
J Otherwise put : All concrete, or genuine, and not barely pos- 
sible truth, is, as such, a truth somewhere experienced. This is the 
inevitable result of the view with which we started when we said that 
without experience there is no knowledge. For truth is, so far as it 
is known. Now this proposition applies as well to the totality of 
the world of finite experience as it does to the parts of that world. 
There must, then, be an experience to which is present the constitu- 
tion (i.e., the actual limitation and narrowness) of all finite experi- 
ence, just as surely as there is such a constitution. That there is 
nothing at all beyond this limited constitution must, as a fact, be 
present to this final experience. But this fact that the world of finite 
experience has no experience beyond it could not be present, as a 
fact, to any but an absolute experience, which knew all that is or 
that genuinely can be known ; and the proposition that a totality 
of finite experience could exist without there being any absolute ex- 
perience thus proves to be simply self-contradictory. 

VIII. 

Let us sum up, in a few words, this whole argument. There is 
for us, as we are, experience. Our thought undertakes the inter- 
pretation of this experience. Every intelligent interpretation of an 



DENIAL OF ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE INVOLVES ITS ASSERTION. 3 1 

experience involves, however, the appeal from this experienced 
fragment to some more organized whole of experience, in whose 
unity this fragment is conceived as finding its organic place. To 
talk of any reality which this fragmentary experience indicates, 
is to conceive this reality as the content of the more organized 
experience. To assert that there is any absolutely real fact indicated 
by our experience, is to regard this reality as presented to an 
absolutely organized experience, in which every fragment finds, 
its place. 

So far, indeed, in speaking of reality and an absolute experi- 
ence, one talks of mere conceptual objects, — one deals, as the mathe- 
matical sciences do, with what appear to be only shadowy Platonic 
ideas. The question arises: Do these Platonic ideas of the abso- 
lute reality, and of the absolutely organized experience, stand for 
anything but merely ideal or possible entities? The right answer 
to this question comes if one first assumes, for argument's sake, 
that such answer is negative, and that there is no organized, but 
only a fragmentary experience. For then one has to define the 
alternative that is to be opposed to the supposedly erroneous con- 
ception of an absolute experience. That alternative, as pointed out, 
is a world of fragmentary experiences, whose limited nature is not 
determined by any all-pervading idea. Such a world of finite ex- 
periences is to be merely what it happens to be, — is to contain 
only what chances here or there to be felt. But hereupon arises 
the question: What reality has this fact of the limitation and frag- 
mentariness of the actual world of experiences? If every reality 
has to exist just in so far as there is experience of its existence, 
then the determination of the world of experience to be this world 
and no other, the fact that reality contains no other facts than 
these, is, as the supposed final reality, itself the object of one ex- 
perience, for which the fragmentariness of the finite world appears 
as a presented and absolute fact, beyond which no reality is to be 
viewed as even genuinely possible. For this final experience, the 
conception of any possible experience beyond is known as an un- 
grounded conception, as an actual impossibility. But so this final 
experience is by hypothesis forthwith defined as One, as All-inclu- 
sive, as determined by nothing beyond itself, as assured of the com- 
plete fulfillment of its own ideas concerning what is, — in brief, it 
becomes an absolute experience. The very effort to deny the abso- 



32 ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE INCLUDES ALL FINITE ONES. 

lute experience involves, then, the actual assertion of such an abso- 
lute experience. 

Our result, then, is: There is an absolute experience, for which 
the conception of an absolute reality, i. e. , the conception of a sys- 
tem of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get pre- 
sented to this experience. This absolute experience is related 
to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. It is 
an experience which finds fulfilled all that the completest thought 
can rationally conceive as genuinely possible. Herein lies its defi- 
nition as an Absolute. For the absolute experience, as for ours, 
there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, ex- 
press, for the absolute experience, its own meaning, its thought, its 
ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the absolute experi- 
ence knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its con- 
tents are indeed particular, — a selection from the world of bare or 
merely conceptual possibilities, — but they form a self-determined 
whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, 
more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or 
genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not 
foreign to those of our finite experience, but are inclusive of them 
in the unity of one life. 

IX. 

The conception now reached I regard as the philosophical con- 
ception of God. Some of you may observe that in the foregoing 
account I have often, in defining the Absolute, made use of the 
terms lately employed by Mr. Bradley, 1 rather than of the terms 
used in either of my two published discussions of the topic, i. e. y 
either in the book that you have been studying, or in my Spirit 
of Modern Philosophy. Such variation of the terms employed 
involves indeed an enrichment, but certainly no essential change 
in the conception. The argument here used is essentially the same 
as the one before employed. You can certainly and, as I still hold, 
quite properly define the Absolute as Thought. But then you 
mean, as in my book I explicitly showed, a thought that is no lon- 
ger, like ours in the exact sciences, concerned with the shadowy 
Platonic ideas, viewed as conceptional possibilities, but a thought 
that sees its own fulfilment in the world of its self-possessed life, — 



1 F. H. Bradley : Appearance and Reality, London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893. 



THIS PROVED IDEAL THE PHILOSOPHIC CONCEPTION OF GOD. 33 



in other words, a thought whose Ideas are not mere shadows, but 
have an aspect in which they are felt as well as meant, appreciated 
as well as described, — yes, I should unhesitatingly say, loved as 
well as conceived, willed as well as viewed. Such an Absolute 
Thought you can also call, in its wholeness, a Self; for it beholds 
the fulfilment of its own thinking, and views the determined char- 
acter of its living experience as identical with what its universal con- 
ceptions mean. All these names: Absolute Self, Absolute Thought, 
Absolute Experience, are not, indeed, mere indifferent names for 
the inexpressible truth; but, when carefully denned through the very 
process of their construction, they are equally valuable expressions 
of different aspects of the same truth. God is known as Thought 
fulfilled; as Experience absolutely organized, so as to have one ideal 
unity of meaning; as Truth transparent to itself; as Life in absolute 
accordance with idea; as Selfhood eternally obtained. And all this 1 
the Absolute is in concrete unity, not in mere variety. 

Yet our purpose here is not religious but speculative. It is not 
mine to-night to declare the glory of the divine being, but simply 
to scrutinize the definition of the absolute. The heart of my whole 
argument, here as in my book, has been the insistence that all these 
seemingly so transcendent and imprudent speculations about the 
absolute are, as a fact, the mere effort to express, as coherently as 
may be, the commonplace implications of our very human ignorance 
itself. People think it very modest to say : We cannot know what 
the absolute reality is. They forget that to make this assertion im- 
plies, unless one is using words idle and without sense, that one 
knows what the term Absolute Reality means. People think it easy 
to say : We can be sure of only what our own finite experience pre- 
sents. They forget that if a world of finite experience exists at 
all, this world must have a consistently definable constitution, in 
order that it may exist. Its constitution, however, turns out to be 
such that an absolute experience — namely, an experience acquainted 
with limitation only in so far as this limitation is determined by the 
organized and transparent constitution of this experience — is needed 
as that for which the fragmentary constitution of the finite world of 
experience exists. The very watchword, then, of our whole doctrine 
is this : All knowledge is of something experienced. For this 
means that nothing actually exists save what is somewhere ex- 
perienced. If this be true, then the total limitation, the determina- 



34 ASCERTAINED FINITUDE CONFESSES THE INFINITE. 

tion, the fragmentariness, the ignorance, the error, — yes (as forms or 
cases of ignorance and error), the evil, the pain, the horror, the 
longing, the travail, the faith, the devotion, the endless flight from 
its own worthlessness, — that constitutes the very essence of the world 
of finite experience, is, as a positive reality, somewhere so experi- 
enced in its wholeness that this entire constitution of the finite 
appears as a world beyond which, in its whole constitution, nothing 
exists or can exist. But, for such an experience, this constitution of 
the finite is a fact determined from an absolute point of view, and 
every finite incompleteness and. struggle appears as a part of a whole 
in whose wholeness the fragments find their true place, the ideas 
their realization, the seeking its fulfilment, and our whole life its 
truth, and so its eternal rest, — that peace which transcends the 
storms of its agony and its restlessness. For this agony and rest- 
lessness are the very embodiment of an incomplete experience, of a 
finite ignorance. 

Do you ask, then : Where in our human world does God get 
revealed ? — what manifests his glory ? I answer : — Our ignorance, 
our fallibility, our imperfection, and so, as forms of this ignorance 
and imperfection, our experience of longing, of strife, of pain, of 
error, — yes, of whatever, as finite, declares that its truth lies in its 
limitation, and so lies beyond itself. These things, wherein we taste 
the bitterness of our finitude, are what they are because they mean 
more than they contain, imply what is beyond them, refuse to exist 
by themselves, and, at the very moment of confessing their own 
fragmentary falsity, assure us of the reality of that fulfilment which 
is the life of God. 

The conception of God thus reached offers itself to you, not as 
destroying, but as fulfilling, the large collection of slowly evolving 
notions that have appeared in the course of history in connection 
with the name of God. 

The foregoing definition of God as an Absolute Experience 
transparently fulfilling a system of organized ideas, is, as you all 
doubtless are aware, in essence identical with the conception first 
reached, but very faintly and briefly developed, by Aristotle. 
Another definition of God, as the Absolute (or Perfect) Reality, long 
struggled in the history of speculation with this idea of God as Ful- 
filled Thought, or as Self-possessed Experience. The inter-relation 
of these two central definitions has long occupied philosophical 



THIS DOCTRINE OF GOD THAT OF ARISTOTLE AND AQUINAS. 35 

thinking. Their rational identification is the work of recent specu- 
lation. The all-powerful and righteous World-creator of the Old 
and New Testaments was first conceived, not speculatively, but 
ethically ; and it is to the rich experience of Christian mysticism 
that the historical honor belongs, of having bridged the gulf that 
seemed to separate, and that to many minds still separates, the God 
of practical faith from the God of philosophical definition. Mysti- 
cism is not philosophy; but, as a stage of human experience, it is 
the link that binds the contemplative to the practical in the history 
of religion, since the saints have taken refuge in it, and the philoso- 
phers have endeavored to emerge from its mysteries to the light of 
clearer insight. To St. Thomas Aquinas belongs the credit of the 
first explicit and fully developed synthesis of the Aristotelian and 
the Christian conceptions of God. The Thomistic proofs of God's 
existence — repeated, diluted, and thus often rendered very trivial, 
by popular apologetic writers — have now, at best, lost much of 
their speculative interest. But the conception of the Divine that 
St. Thomas reached, remains in certain important respects central, 
and in essence identical, I think, with the definition that I have here 
tried to repeat ; and that, too, despite the paradoxes and the errors 
involved in the traditional conception of the creation of the world. 

For the rest, let me in closing be perfectly frank with you. I 
myself am one of those students whom a more modern and radical 
scepticism has, indeed, put in general very much out of sympathy 
with many of what seem to me the unessential accidents of 
religious tradition as represented in the historical faith; and for 
such students this scepticism has transformed, in many ways, our 
methods of denning our relation to truth. But this scepticism has 
not thrown even the most radical of us, if we are enlightened, out 
of a close, a rational, a spiritually intelligent relation to those deep 
ideas that, despite all these accidents, have moulded the heart of 
the history of religion. In brief, then, the foregoing conception of 
God undertakes to be distinctly theistic, and not pantheistic. It is 
not the conception of any Unconscious Reality, into which finite be- 
ings are absorbed; nor of an Universal Substance, in whose law our 
ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which* we 
can only silently adore. On the contrary, every ethical predicate 
which the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God, 
is capable of exact interpretation in terms of our present view. For 



36 PROFESSOR MEZES' CRITICISM OF FOREGOING ARGUMENT. 

my own part, then, while I wish to be no slave of any tradition, I 
am certainly disposed to insist that what the faith of our fathers has 
genuinely meant by God, is, despite all the blindness and all the 
unessential accidents of religious tradition, identical with the inevit- 
able outcome of a reflective philosophy. 



REMARKS IN CRITICISM OF THE ADDRESS, BY 
PROFESSOR SIDNEY EDWARD MEZES. 



Well worthy of note, in the exercises of this evening, is the 
fact that nearly all the participants have stood to each other in the 
relation of teacher and pupil. Not very many years ago, the meet- 
ing of such persons in a public discussion would have been nearly 
impossible; or, at all events, the key-note of the meeting would 
most probably have been an entirely genuine and yet somewhat 
monotonous agreement. But a frank independence of thought is 
the informing spirit of modern teaching in this country. Teachers 
care comparatively little to have students agree with them, but 
insist very strongly that they shall think out their own thoughts for 
themselves. Students are not merely informed of old solutions. 
They are rather trained and encouraged to think out new solutions, 
on the chance that the new may supplement some of the imperfec- 
tions of the old. Some modern teachers even carry this so far as 
positively to distrust such students as agree with them. Now, 
Professor Royce is a typical modern teacher; and, indeed, in what 
I have just said, I am doing little more than repeat what I have 
often heard him say to his classes. For a long time, as I will now 
confess, it was desperately difficult to disagree with him and yet 
seem to oneself at all reasonable. For he has a way of mounting 
his facts in a setting of stringent logic, and of driving home his con- 
clusions with the persuasive power of a finished rhetoric. But by 
dint of long and strenuous effort to look at things for myself, I have 
succeeded in meeting his requirement that I should disagree with 
him, and I have some hope of persuading you, and, possibly, Pro- 
fessor Royce too, that my disagreements are solidly founded. But 
of that you shall now judge. 



I. — NO PROOF OF WORTH AND DIGNITY IN THE ABSOLUTE. 37 



In considering Professor Royce's position, as outlined in the 
address we have just heard, I shall limit myself to two criticisms. 
My first, in a word, is this : I cannot agree with the Professor that 
the Being whose existence, as I freely admit, he has fully established, 
has been proved by him to be a being possessing worth and dignity. 
When he says, that, under pain of self-contradiction, we must assert 
that an Ultimate Being exists, that he is fully conscious, that his ex- 
perience is organized, or, what amounts to the same thing, that within 
his experience there are to be found no unanswered questions and no 
unsatisfied desires, I find the reasoning compulsory, inevitable. A 
confusion, an unanswered problem, a thwarted desire, in order to be 
such, holds in solution its own clarification, answer, or satisfaction, 
as the case may be. All this Professor Royce has expounded at 
some length, far more convincingly than I can, and I need not 
repeat it. But what I miss is, his promised proof that there is a 
real being worthy of the exalted name of God. 

The difficulty I experience with his view may be stated in the 
form of a question : — How does he find out what facts, what prob- 
lems, confront the Absolute ? 

To this question, the answer is not far to seek. Professor 
Royce accepts such facts and problems at the hands of current 
belief and science. That we all do the same, and must do so, is 
of course true, as a few words would make clear. But the important 
question, to be considered presently, is: Upon how many facts, thus 
attained, does philosophy, or rather Professor Royce's philosophy, 
set its stamp of approval? At the present moment, my words, 
possibly a few thoughts and problems suggested by them, and what 
we feel and see, are the only facts directly present to us ; and, as 
you will readily admit, the other moments of our lives are just 
about as meagerly supplied with directly verified data. That vast 
sum-totals of facts have existed in past ages, and that others are exist- 
ing now in the distant stretches of space, we all confidently believe ; 
but, observe, only on indirect evidence. We get at absent facts by 
means of memory, sympathetic thinking of the thoughts of others, 
and reasoning founded on these two, combined with personal 
observation. The existence of such a fact as the Crocker Building, 
we now get at by memory ; we get to know the experiences and 
beliefs of our friends, acquaintances, and scientific co-workers who 
verify our results, largely by sympathetic thought; while the scientific 



38 FOR HIS PSYCHIC CONTENTS, PROVED, ARE VERY MEAGRE. 

historian reconstructs the Napoleonic period by very elaborate 
processes of reasoning and observation. And so we project idea 
after idea out of the present into the past, the distant, and the future, 
holding each to be a fact there, gradually peopling our previously 
empty world, and extending its bounds in thought till we come to 
believe in the complicated immensity of the universe of reality. 

But observe, once more, that all except the meagre present is 
reached indirectly, i. e. , by means of inference. These inferences no 
doubt are justifiable, as we all most certainly believe; but my present 
point is, that they must be justified; that nothing can be held to be 
a part of the inclusive experience of the Absolute, till its existence 
is fully proven. Now, it is not the business of philosophy to prove 
the existence of individual facts; but, on the other hand, it is the 
business of philosophy to establish the truth of such principles as 
are indispensable for proving the existence of any and every indi- 
vidual fact not directly observed. Further, it is a commonplace of 
philosophy, that the principle of Causality is the supreme principle of 
the kind just described. Accordingly, wherever Professor Royce 
holds this principle to have validity, just there, and nowhere else, 
can he seek for the items of fact to set in the experience of the Abso- 
lute. Now, as readers of his second book, The Spirit of Modern 
Philosophy, will remember, he holds that the principle of Causality 
is true in the outer world of our senses and of natural science, but 
is not true in the world of inner experiences, nor in inferences from 
the former to the latter and vice versa-, and, so far as I know, he 
nowhere offers any other principle to justify such inferences, though 
he has a theory of their origin. 

Let us now remind ourselves, once again, that our fellow- 
beings' inner experiences are among the facts never directly 
presented to us. When a man speaks to us, we hear his words, but 
merely infer his thoughts; when another cries out or writhes in pain, 
we hear the cry or see the writhing, but the pain, once more, is only 
inferred. And in like manner, aspiration, hope, doubt, despair, — 
the whole of the inner life of others , is reached indirectly only. Add 
to this, that his inner life completely exhausts and fathoms what we 
mean by our fellow-being, and we see that in failing to offer any 
principle that justifies inferences from observed facts to inner experi- 
ences Professor Royce fails to give any philosophic reason for 
belief in the existence of our fellow-beings. Let us suppose, now, 



FINITE SELVES IN THE INFINITE INCLUSIVE SELF, NOT PROVED. 39 

that the outer or physical universe, in which according to Profes- 
sor Royce the principle of Causality does obtain — and whose facts 
are therefore attainable — let us suppose, for argument's sake, that 
its reality is not destroyed by the philosophic annihilation of other 
beings. What sum-total of firmly established facts is left over to us ? 
At best, the whole outer world and so much inner experience as 
the present moment affords. Just now you can at the utmost assert 
—and all assertion is in some now — that Reality is composed of so 
much outer fact as science establishes, plus your present feelings, 
thoughts, puzzles, and aspirations. 

And now let us consider the experience-contents of that sort 
of Absolute whose existence Professor Royce has proved. These 
consist, once more, of the outer world of science, of your present 
feelings, thoughts, puzzles, and aspirations, and, in addition, of the 
answers to your present puzzles and the satisfaction of your present 
aspirations. Now, a being with such an experience, as I should 
maintain, is not deeply spiritual. His experience consists of a vast 
physical universe with its myriads of mechanically whirling atoms, 
and, tucked away in one corner, the least bit of spiritual life, which, 
to be sure, has its questions answered and its desires gratified. 

My only contention, observe, is that unless the gaps I have 
pointed out in Professor Royce' s argument are filled, we are left 
with the slightly spiritual Ultimate Being I have just described. I 
maintain that Professor Royce' s two books and his address of to- 
night do not justify us in introducing any more spirituality into the 
experience of the Inclusive Self. I do not maintain, of course, that 
he has in reserve no considerations capable of establishing a larger 
measure of spirituality; still less do I contend that no such consid- 
erations exist. On the contrary, I very firmly believe that there 
are facts at our disposal which will give philosophical justification 
for the assertion of the completest conceivable spirituality of the 
Ultimate Being, conceived of in the terms so clearly outlined in 
this evening's address. 

Passing now to my second point, let us recall what Professor 
Royce said about the attributes of the Supreme Being; or, rather, 
let us recollect two of those attributes. I refer to Absoluteness and 
Goodness. In calling God the Absolute, we mean that he is quite 
complete — is a rounded whole; has, so to speak, no ragged edges, 



4° II.— COMPLETENESS AND GOODNESS NOT EXPOUNDED COMPATIBLY. 

no internal gaps. Sleep is a chasm in each day of our lives; while, 
from time to time, we have gaps of unconsciousness. Again, if we 
try to tear our lives from their setting in the world, we find that the 
line that bounds them is jagged and broken throughout. At times 
one feels that his life is exhaustively summed up in relations to 
other lives, and that what is left over when those bonds are snapped 
is too poor to be worth saving. Not so the Absolute. His life is 
completely finished, rounded and whole, and has no relations to any 
beyond. And now I will ask you to look at this attribute of 
Absoluteness or Completeness under the conception of time. For, 
temporally speaking, Completeness is eternal existence. 

According to Professor Royce, as readers of his books will 
readily remember, the whole universe is present to the Supreme 
Being in one moment, and that moment is eternal. There is for the 
Supreme Being nothing whatever in the least analogous to what we 
call the past and the future. What occurred yesterday in your expe- 
rience or in mine, what will occur to-morrow for us, or for any other 
human being whatever, is just as really, vitally, vividly, distinctly 
present to God as the gentlemen now sitting on this platform are to 
you at the present moment. And in all eternity this is, for God, true 
of all facts, whether called by us past, present, or future. It is as if 
all of us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through 
the waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the water seems 
to move. What has passed is a memory; what is to come is doubt- 
ful. But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that, 
in fact, it is quiet, immovable, unruffled. Speaking technically, 
time is no reality; things seem past and future, and, in a sense, non- 
existent to us, but in fact they are just as genuinely real as the 
present is. Is Julius Caesar dead and turned to clay ? No doubt he 
is. But in reality he is also alive, he is conquering Spain, Gaul, 
Greece, and Egypt. He is leading the Roman legions into Britain, 
and dominating the envious Senate, just as truly as he is dead and 
turned to clay, — just as truly as you hear the words I am now 
speaking. Every reality is eternally real; pastness and futurity are 
merely illusions. You look into a stereoscope, and two flat cards 
variously shaded appear to be a large city spread out before your 
eyes. But that seeming city is not a fact. The two cards variously 
shaded are the reality. Babylon and Tyre, on the other hand, 
seem unreal to us; but those cities are real, and the throb of life 



FOR COMPLETENESS, QUOAD ROYCE, INVOLVES ETERNITY, 4.I 

pulses through the veins of their citizens, even now, just as truly and 
strongly as it does through yours. I do not know how many of you 
have caught this view, — this idea of the eternal existence of every- 
thing real; but those of you who have, will bear me out that it is 
perfectly comprehensible, realizable, natural. The illusory unreality 
of pastness and futurity is an entirely reasonable doctrine; and I 
have dwelt on it only in order to contrast with it another sense of the 
word Eternal, also necessary if it is to be synonymous with Com- 
pleteness, as maintained by Professor Royce. For there are two 
senses essential to the notion of Eternity, if it is to be synonymous 
with the notion of Completeness. In the sense already developed, 
it contradicts the notion of time in asserting that past or future 
experience is as real as present experience. In the second sense, it 
also contradicts the notion of time, in a way that will presently 
appear. 

And now, if you will kindly give me your very sharp attention 
for a minute or two, I will try to develop this second sense quite 
plainly. I will do so by showing that, though past and future 
coexist, time has not been entirely done away with; the full meaning 
of Eternity, and therefore of Completeness, has not been attained. 
Even if past and future are equally real with the present and with 
each other, does it follow that there is no distinction between the past 
and the future ? Does it follow that what we call the completion of a 
process is in no wise different from what we call its beginning ? To 
put it somewhat graphically, could we begin at the end of a sym- 
phony, play the notes backwards, and get the same results as if we 
had begun at the beginning and played them forwards ? Of course, 
the same facts would be there in the former case as in the latter, 
and we have already maintained that first and last and intermediate 
notes are to be coexistent. The first do not cease to exist, the next 
come into existence, ceasing in turn, and giving place to those that 
follow. They all exist at once; that has been admitted. The question 
I am now considering is the possibility of reversing any significant 
process without utterly destroying its significance; or, if reversing be 
too strong a word, the possibility of conceiving any whole of facts 
that appear to us as a succession quite indifferently as regards their 
order, — backwards quite as truly as forwards. Ordinarily, you see, 
we view the end as if it were the product of the beginning. The 
facts are looked upon as having a true order, from A to Z, say, 



4 2 AND ETERNITY ANNULS TIME, PROGRESS, AND THEREFORE GOODNESS. 

while the order from Z to A is declared unreal. Now, if we are 
right in maintaining that in some true sense the movement of things 
is in one direction, we have not done away with time entirely. The 
full meaning of Eternity is not attained. We still admit a difference 
between past and future. This difference is not one of existence ; it 
is not that the past no longer is % and the future is not yet. Both 
past and future most really are ; and yet, if our ordinary view is 
correct, the past is not the same as the future. 

But suppose our ordinary view is not correct; what is the 
penalty for its incorrectness ? I answer, in a word, it is death to all 
significance. The world, as a whole, is emptied of meaning: — Art 
is no longer real; morality ceases to be. For morality is victory 
achieved over temptation, and not temptation following upon 
victory. Temptation does succeed to victory in our experience, 
but the growth of temptation out of victory is not morality. The 
very life of morality is toil, struggle, achievement ; we must over- 
come difficulties; the stream of morality must rise higher than its 
source. Take progress away, and you destroy morality. This, 
after all, is very obvious, nor would I be understood to say that 
Professor Royce denies this, On the contrary, he is at considera- 
ble pains to assert and illustrate it. He maintains that the Supreme 
Being is moral for the very reason that he hates and conquers im- 
morality. He maintains that evolution gives a truer view of reality 
than does descriptive science, for the reason that evolution asserts 
progress, apprehends the significance of progress, reads the begin- 
ning in the light of the end, would, as a completed doctrine (which 
it is not), uphold what Mr. John Fiske might call Cosmic Morality. 
But I venture to suggest that Goodness requires progress, and of the 
whole. That there is progress in bits of the Inclusive Self, Professor 
Royce does maintain; but if the Inclusive Self is to be moral, he 
must be in his totality progressive. The whole of him must advance 
without limitation towards some goal. If the universe is moral, it 
points in one direction; it has grown from a germ, budded out more 
and more widely, grown ever higher, at no time fully satisfied, 
ever striving onwards and upwards. But once admit movement in 
one direction, and all the antinomies — all the irreducible contra- 
dictions — of time are upon us with undiminished force. The arbi- 
trariness inherent in both beginning and end is not diminished by 
their coexistence. No real beginning or end can be rationally estab- 



PROFESSOR LeCONTE ON THE ADDRESS AND ITS SUBJECT. 43 

lished; for whatever one we may hit upon as real, the problem 
Why this rather than another? must always, as Lord Bacon would 
say, be left abrupt. 

What I venture to suggest, as you will now see, is that the 
attribute of Goodness demands progress, growth; and that progress, 
even though past and future coexist, comes into collision with Com- 
pleteness, because of the inherent arbitrariness of beginning and 
ending, of germ and fruition. If this position is well taken, either 
one or the other attribute, either Goodness or Completeness, as Pro- 
fessor Royce conceives Completeness, must be abandoned. I am 
far from saying that there is no possible way of so conceiving Com- 
pleteness that it shall be in harmony with Goodness; nor would I 
even imply that Professor Royce may not have in reserve some 
mode of proving the existence of a Complete Reality that would 
avoid a conflict between its Completeness and its Goodness. What 
I halt at, is simply the mode of proof that he has actually employed 
to-night, as well as in his book. Upon that, it certainly seems to me 
that the Completeness established is quite destitute of consistency 
with Goodness. 



REMARKS ON THE ADDRESS, AND ON ITS SUBJECT, 
BY PROFESSOR JOSEPH Le CONTE. 



I can only admire, not criticise, the subtle method of Pro- 
fessor Royce in reaching the conclusion of the Personal Existence 
of God. I have my own way of reaching the same conclusion, but 
in comparison it is a rough and ready way. His is from the point 
of view of the philosopher; mine, from that of the scientist. I am 
not saying that his is not the best and most satisfactory, but only that 
it is a different way. He has given you his ; I now give you, very 
briefly, mine — as I have been accustomed to give it. 

Suppose, then, I could remove the brain-cap of one of you, and 
expose the brain in active work, — as it doubtless is at this moment. 
Suppose, further, that my senses were absolutely perfect, so that I 
could see everything that was going on there. What would I see ? 
Only decompositions and recompositions, molecular agitations and 
vibrations ; in a word, physical phenomena, and nothing else. 
There is absolutely nothing else there to see. But you, the subject 



44 GOD ARGUED AS COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS; OMNISCIENCE INSUFFICIENT. 

of this experiment, what do you perceive ? You see nothing of all 
this; you perceive an entirely different set of phenomena, viz., con- 
sciousness, — thought, emotion, will; psychical phenomena; in a 
word, a self, a person. From the outside we see only physical, from 
the inside only psychical phenomena. 

Now, take external Nature — the Cosmos — instead of the brain. 
The observer from the outside sees, and can see, only physical 
phenomena; there is absolutely nothing else there to see. But must 
there not be in this case also, on the other side, psychical phenomena 
— consciousness, thought, emotion, will? — in a word, a Self, a 
Person ? There is only one place in the whole world where we can 
get behind physical phenomena — behind the veil of matter; viz., in 
our own brain; and we find there — a self, a person. Is it not 
reasonable to think that if we could get behind the veil of Nature 
we should find the same, i. e., a Person? But if so, we must con- 
clude, an Infinite Person, and therefore the only Complete Person- 
ality that exists. Perfect personality is not only self-conscious 
but self -existent. Our personalities are self-conscious, indeed, but 
not self-existent. They are only imperfect images and, as it were, 
separated fragments of the Infinite Personality — God. 

So much for my habitual preference, as contrasted with Pro- 
fessor Royce' s, in the matter of proving God to exist ; and there 
seem to be differences between us on other matters too, though 
perhaps these are more apparent than real. 

For instance: Professor Royce accounts it best to state the 
essential nature of God in terms of Omniscience, and with this my 
customary preference of thinking would hardly seem to accord. 
For Professor Royce, God is Thought; conscious, indeed, but 
passive, powerless, passionless Thought; omniscience alone is funda- 
mental, and all else flows from that. And yet I cannot but think that 
the difference between us here is more apparent than real. For 
example, when he denies God power, is it not a power like that of 
man that he is talking about ? — that is, an action or energy going 
out and terminating on something external and foreign? God's 
power, I grant, is not like that; for there is nothing external or 
foreign to Him. And when he denies Him love, at least as a 
fundamental and essential quality, is it not the human form of love 
that he is thinking of? — that which stirs the human blood, and 



PROBLEM OF EVIL: MORAL POSTULATE AS VALID AS THE SCIENTIFIC. 45 

agitates the human heart ? Doubtless the Infinite Benevolence of 
God is different from that; but is there not a similar difference in 
the matter of thought also? Is it not equally true that ti His 
thoughts are not as our thoughts" f All we can say is, that there 
is in God something- which corresponds to all these things in man. 
The formula of St. John, God is Love, or the popular formula God 
is Power, is as true as the philosophic formula God is Thought. 
All of these are truths, but partial truths. A more fundamental 
formula than either is the formula of the Divine Master, God is 
Spirit. For Spirit is essential Life, and essential Energy, and 
essential Love, and essential Thought; in a word, essential Person. 

Again, on the great question of Evil, — its nature, its origin, its 
reason, — a question inseparably connected with the conception of 
God, — there are apparent differences between Professor Royce and 
myself; and yet these, too, may be less than they seem. In a gen- 
eral way, certainly, I agree with his explanation of the dark enigma 
of Evil. Evil cannot be the true meaning and real outcome of the 
universe ; on the contrary, it is the means, the necessary means, of 
the highest good ; and thus it is, in a legitimate sense, nothing but 
good in disguise. This is a necessary postulate of our moral nature. 
Professor Royce has admirably shown this, in his chapter entitled 
"The World of the Postulates." Our moral and religious nature 
is just as fundamental and essential as our scientific and rational 
nature. As science is not simply passionless acquisition of knowl- 
edge, but also enthusiasm for truth, so morality is not passionless 
rules of best conduct, but impassioned love of righteousness. And 
this last is what we call Religion ; for religion is morality touched 
and vivified with noble emotion. Now, the necessary postulate of 
science, without which scientific activity would be impossible, is a 
Rational Order of the universe ; and, similarly, the necessary pos- 
tulate of religion, without which religious activity would be impos- 
sible, is a Moral Order of the universe. As science postulates the 
final triumph of reason, so religion must postulate the final triumph 
of righteousness. Science believes in the Rational Order, or in law, 
in spite of apparent confusion ; she knows that disorder is only 
apparent, only the result of ignorance ; and her mission is, to show 
this by reducing all appearances, all phenomena, to law. So also 
Religion is right in her unshakable belief in the Moral Order, in 



4 6 



PROBLEM OF EVIL: SIN THE MEANS TO MORAL FREEDOM. 



spite of apparent disorder or evil ; she knows that evil is only ap- 
parent, the result of our ignorance and our weakness ; and her 
mission is, to show this by helping on the triumph of moral order 
over disorder. We may, if we like, — as many indeed do, — reject 
the faith in the Infinite Goodness, and thereby paralyze our religious 
activity ; but then, to be consistent, we must also reject the faith in 
the Infinite Reason, and thereby paralyze our scientific activity. 

So much for a rational justification of the indestructible faith 
Religion has in the Infinite Righteousness, even in the presence of 
abounding evil. It is founded on the same ground as our indestruc- 
tible faith in the Reign of Law in the natural world, and is just as 
reasonable. Why is it, then, it may be asked, that every one is 
willing to admit the postulate of science, while so many doubt that 
of religion. I answer : Partly because of the feebleness of our moral 
life in comparison with our physical life ; but mainly because the 
steady advance of science, with its progressive conquest of chaos, 
and its extension of the domain of order and law, is a continual 
verification of the postulate of science, and justification of our faith 
therein; while, on the contrary, the progress of morality and 
religion is uncertain and often unrecognized, the increase of right- 
eousness and decrease of evil doubtful and even denied. In the 
presence of such uncertainty, our faith is often sorely tried. We 
cry out for some explanation — for some philosophy which shall show 
us how evil is consistent with the Infinite Goodness. We know it 
is, for that is a necessary postulate. But — How ? 

In regard to moral evil, or sin, — which, I need not say, is the 
really dreadful form, — Professor Royce's explanation (which, by the 
way, is the same as that given in the last chapter of my book entitled 
Evolution and Religious Thought) is, I believe, the true one. It is, 
that the existence or at least the possibility of what we call Evil is 
the necessary condition of a moral being like that of man. There 
are some things which God himself cannot do, viz., such things as 
are contrary to his essential nature, and such things as are a contra- 
diction in terms and therefore absurd and unthinkable. Such a 
thing would be a moral being without freedom to choose right or 
wrong. God could not make man eternally and of necessity sinless, 
for then he would not be man at all. To make him incapable of sin 
would be to make him also incapable of virtue, of righteousness, of 
Holiness ; for he must acquire these for himself by free choice, by 



royce's view needs reinforcement from evolution. 47 

struggle and conquest. Professor Royce brings this out admirably ; 
but it seems to me this view is singularly emphasized by the evolu- 
tional account of the origin of man. For if humanity gradually 
emerged out of animality, then it is evident that man's higher 
nature — his distinctive humanity — was at first very feeble, and that 
the whole mission of man is the progressive conquest of the animal 
by the distinctively human nature. It has been a long and hard 
struggle, and even yet, as we all know and feel, is far from complete. 

As already said, then, I believe Professor Royce gives a true 
answer so far as moral evil is concerned, although he misses the em- 
phasis which evolution gives that view. But other evil — physical evil 
— he gives up, in his book, in despair. And yet, from the point of 
view of evolution, this is exactly the form of evil that is most ex- 
plicable. For as moral evil is a necessity for a progressive moral 
being, just so, and far more obviously, is physical evil a necessity for 
a progressive rational being. As the one form of evil is closely 
connected with our moral nature, so is the other indissolubly con- 
nected with our intellectual nature. Let me explain: The necessary 
condition of any evolution is a struggle with an apparently inimical 
environment. For example, the end and goal, the significance, the 
only raison d' etre, of organic evolution in general, is the achieve- 
ment of a rational being — man. The necessary condition of that 
achievement was the struggle with what seemed at every stage an 
inimical i. e. evil environment. But looking back over the course in 
the light of its glorious result — the achievement of man — we at once 
see that what seemed evil is really good. Now it is equally the 
same with human evolution in relation to physical evil. The goal 
and end, the raison d' etre, of social progress is the achievement of 
the ideal man — perfect both in knowledge and in character. But 
the attainment of perfect knowledge is impossible except in the 
presence of what seems at every stage an evil environment, and by 
conflict with it. But, evidently, such an environment is evil only 
through ignorance of the laws of Nature. Evil is therefore the 
necessary spur that goads us on to increase of knowledge. We are 
but foolish little children, at school. Nature, our schoolmistress, 
chastises us relentlessly until we get our lessons. It is quite evident 
that without the scourge of Evil humanity would never have emerged 
out of animality, or, having emerged, would never have advanced 
beyond the lowest stages. It is also evident that perfect knowledge 



48 PHYSICAL EVIL JUSTIFIED BY EVOLUTION. IMMORTALITY. 

of the laws of Nature would remove every physical evil. Looking 
back over the course, then, from the elevated plane of perfect knowl- 
edge, and perceiving that the attainment of that plane was con- 
ditioned on the existence of evil — on punishment for ignorance — 
shall we any longer call it evil ? Is it not really good in disguise ? 

But it may be answered: "Yes, this is all true if we accept 
evolution by struggle as a necessary process; but why may not the 
same result have been attained in some less expensive and distress- 
ing way?" I answer: Because, as already seen, no other process 
is conceivable that would result in a moral being, and achievement 
of such a being is the purpose of all evolution. One law, one 
process, one meaning and purpose, runs through all evolution, and 
that purpose is only revealed at the end. As in biology the laws 
of form and structure are best studied in the lowest organisms, 
where these are simplest, but those of function are studied best in the 
highest organisms, because only there clearly expressed, just so 
the laws of process in evolution are best understood in its lower and 
simpler stages, but the end, the purpose and meaning of the whole 
process from the beginning, is not fully declared until the end. 
That end is the achievement of a moral being; and a moral being 
without struggle with evil is impossible because a contradiction in 
terms, and the same law must run throughout. 

Finally, the true conception of God, as this appears to me, and 
especially in his relation to us, is closely bound up with the absorb- 
ing question of Immortality. And on this, I surmise that Professor 
Royce and I differ; though I am less sure that we do, judging by 
his hints of what is coming in his more esoteric lectures next week. 
But in his book he gives up the question of Immortality as insoluble 
by philosophy. Well, — perhaps it is; but upon this question, as upon 
that of Evil, I think a great light is thrown by the evolutional view 
of the origin of man. 

Until recently, man's mind was studied wholly apart from mind 
as appearing in all the rest of Nature. Thus an elaborate system 
of philosophy was built up without the slightest reference to the 
psychic phenomena of animals. The grounds of our belief in 
immortality were based largely on a supposed separateness of man 
from brutes — his complete uniqueness in the whole scheme of Nature. 
This is now no longer possible. If man came by a natural process 



EVOLUTIONAL PROOF OF EXISTENCE AFTER DEATH. 49 

from the animal kingdom — his spirit from the anima of animals — 
then the psychical phenomena of man should no longer be studied 
apart from those of animals nearest approaching him. As anatomy, 
physiology and embryology became scientific only by becoming 
comparative anatomy, comparative physiology and comparative 
embryology, so psychology can never become scientific and rational 
until it becomes comparative psychology — until the psychical phe- 
nomena of man are studied in comparison with those foreshad- 
owings and beginnings of similar phenomena which we find in 
animals most nearly approaching him. Evolution is not only a 
scientific theory; it is not only a philosophy; it is a great scientific 
method, transforming every department of thought. Every subject 
must be studied anew in its light. The grounds of belief in immor- 
tality must be thus studied anew. It is well known that I have 
striven earnestly to make such a study. I know that many think 
that this method of study destroys those grounds completely and 
forever; but I also know that those who think so take a very super- 
ficial view of evolution and of man. At the risk of tediousness, I 
will bring forward, once more, an outline of my view, but in a 
different way, which I hope will be readily understood by those who 
have followed my previous writings. 

I assume, then, the immanence of Deity in Nature. Further- 
more, as you already know, I regard physical and chemical forces, 
or the forces of dead Nature, as a portion of the omnipresent Divine 
Energy in a diffused, unindividuated state, and therefore not self- 
active but having its phenomena determined directly by the Divine 
Energy. Individuation of energy, or self-activity, begins, as I 
suppose, with Life, and proceeds, pari passu with organization of 
matter, to complete itself as a Moral Person in man. Mr. Upton, 1 
in his Hibbert Lectures, given in 1893, takes a similar view, except 
that he makes all force — even physical force — in some degree self- 
active; and thence it goes on with increasing individuation and self- 
activity to completion in man, — as in my view. The difference is 
unimportant. To use his mode of expression, God may be con- 
ceived as self-sundering his Energy, and setting over against himself 
a part as Nature. A part of this part, by a process of evolution, 
individuates itself more and more, and finally completes its individua- 

1 C. B. Upton : Bases of Religious Belief. Hibbert Lectures for 1893. London : Wil- 
liams and Norgate, 1894. 



50 



THE SOUL'S DESCENT AND REASCENSION. 



tion and self-activity in the soul of man. On this view, spirit — 
which is a spark of Divine Energy — is a potentiality in dead Nature, 
a germ in plants, a quickened embryo in animals, and comes to 
birth into a higher world of spirit-life in man. Self- consciousness 
— from which flows all that is distinctive of man — is the sign of birth 
into the spiritual world. Thus an effluence from the Divine Person 
flows downward into Nature to rise again by evolution to recogni- 
tion of, and communion with, its own Source. 

Now observe, and this is the main point: The sole purpose of 
this self-sundering of the Divine Energy is thereby to have some- 
thing to contemplate. And the sole purpose of this progressive 
individuation of the Divine Energy by evolution is finally to have, in 
man, something not only to contemplate but also to love and 
to be loved by, and, in the ideal man, to love and to be loved by 
supremely. Thus God is not only necessary to us — but we also to 
Him. This part of God, self-separated and, as it were, set over 
against himself, and including every visible manifestation or revela- 
tion of himself, may well be called a Second Person of the Godhead 
which by eternal generation develops into sons in man, and finally 
into fulness of godhead in the ideal man — the Divine Man — as His 
well-beloved Son. By this view, there is a new significance in 
Nature. Nature is the womb in which, and evolution the process by 
which, are generated sons of God. Now, — do you not see? — without 
immortality, this whole purpose is balked — the whole process of 
cosmic evolutio?i is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great 
pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with Him, and then 
allow it to lapse again into nothingness ? 



CONCLUDING COMMENTS BY THE PRESIDENT, 1 
PROFESSOR G. H. HOWISON. 



A task now falls to me, ladies and gentlemen, and fellow- 
members of the Union, which for its difficulty I would gladly 
decline, but which the Union will expect me at least to undertake. 
As younger students of philosophy, you my associates in the Union 
have called upon me to be your elder adviser; and on such an occa- 
sion as the present, which marks an epoch in your philosophical 
intercourse, you naturally look for me to put at your service any 
larger experience than your own that I may chance to possess in 
these fields, however insufficient it may prove when compared with 
the wide and deep reaches over which your speakers have carried 
you to-night. 

The impressive close of the argument by the venerated man 
who has but just now ceased addressing you, is such as must 
awaken a deep response in every human heart not touched with 
apathy. It is one of those rare outbreaks of accumulated expec- 
tation, hope, and longing, into which, at the contemplation of 
the reason that is apparently struggling to get a footing in the 
world, human nature pours forth all its commingled doubt and 
faith. Such is the impassioned force of the argument from 
analogy, fortified, as it can be in these later days, by the doctrine 
of evolution. As Dr. LeConte has so eloquently and so forcibly 
shown, it does seem clear, through the long and agonizing path 
of evolution, — through struggle, and death, and survival, — that 
a rational, a moral, a self-active being is on the way toward 
realized existence; and it is true that, unless there is immortality 
awaiting it, this long and hard advance through Nature will be 
balked, and the whole process of evolution turn futile. As surely 
as there is a God, — as surely as eternal Reason and Justice is 
really at the heart of things, — it is certain, on this showing, that 
there is everlasting continuance for the Being, whatever it may be, 



1 Intended for delivery, but omitted on account of the late hour, and much enlarged for 
printing. 



52 THE DESTINY OF MAN DEPENDENT ON THE REALITY OF GOD. 

that forms the goal toward which evolution is pressing. If in very- 
deed and truth there is a God, then that He "shall be so long 
and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing 
with Him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness," is 
indeed incredible, — nay, it is impossible. And I doubt not that 
your undulled human hearts are so roused by the pathos-laden 
question with which Dr. LeConte closed his reasonings — a question 
almost appalling in its outcry to Justice and to Pity — that it will 
require all your poise of philosophic will to bring yourselves back 
into the region of collected thought once more, and look the great 
problem of to-night steadily in the face again, with what Professor 
Roy ce has so fitly named 4 ' the calmer piety and gentleness of the 
serious reason." 

For, in sober truth, the central awe of all such faith-compelling 
questions and analogies is just this: that we see the whole matter 
hangs on the slender thread of the query whether there is indeed a 
God. If there is, then immortality — yes, the immortality of each 
particular soul — is certain, by God's own immutable nature; and 
evolution, though it cannot ascertain it, nevertheless gives premoni- 
tion of it then, and supports the real proof. But — what if there is 
not? The goal of evolution, as really verifiable by observation, is 
unfortunately not the preservation and completion of any single 
life, but only of a kind, — only of a human family, — ever made up, 
I beg you will notice, of new and wholly different members; a 
family, moreover, whose abode is only on this globe, and on this 
side of the grave, with no indication whatever that this its home 
will or can last forever ; — nay, with all the observed indications 
steadily against this, and all the metaphysical necessities of physical 
existence declaring it impossible. 

And so we are brought back, perhaps somewhat sternly, to the 
great questions of our meeting. We have had, from men of such emi- 
nence as to command serious attention everywhere, two high efforts 
to set forth the Conception of God and the proofs of his existence; 
and we have listened to a keen criticism of the first of them by the 
young but highly qualified pupil of all three of us, — a criticism 
fascinating by its speculative and almost dreamy subtlety. Now 
let us gather our calmness and our wits together as best we may, 
and, during the short period that is left to us, try to discover 
what abiding store we ought to set by these endeavors. What I 



IDEALISM THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALL THE SPEAKERS. 



53 



say must be, I fear, all too brief — too brief, that is, to do these 
arguments the justice that their intricacy, their remoteness, and 
the long and deep studies which have gone to their making, would 
in reason demand. But I will set before you as clearly as I can 
the main points on which I think the evening's discussion turns, 
adding such comments on the conceptions and arguments as my 
own way of thinking suggests. 

I. 

I am glad I can tell you, first of all, that there is a profound 
agreement among all the previous speakers in the important matter 
of the foundation on which all of this evening's reasonings rest; — 
yes, I am confident I may go farther, and say that we are all agreed 
upon this, and, further, as to the entire foundation of philosophy 
itself. I agree with all three of the previous speakers in the great 
tenet that evidently underlies their whole way of thinking. Our' 
common philosophy is Idealism — that explanation of the world 
which maintains that the only thing absolutely real is Mind; that all 
material and all temporal existences take their being from Mind, 
from Consciousness that thinks and experiences; that out of con- 
sciousness they all issue, to consciousness are presented, and that 
presence to consciousness constitutes their entire reality and entire 
existence. But this great foundation-theme may be uttered in very 
various ways; and your other speakers, while they go on in agree- 
ment with each other very far, at length diverge; and they diverge 
at a very early point from the way of interpreting idealistic philoso- 
phy that I have myself learned to use. 

And, if I am not unaccountably mistaken, you have already 
had presented here to-night two considerably varying systems of 
Idealism, albeit they still go on together far beyond the broad 
foundations of all idealistic philosophy. I say two; for, unless I 
mistake Professor Mezes, his view accords so nearly with that of 
Professor Royce as to permit us to neglect the differences and 
count the pair as one, setting it in contrast to the system of Dr. 
LeConte. I speak here with hesitancy, however, and only with 
such positive evidences as our evening's work has afforded; and I 
accordingly leave room for the supposition that Professor Mezes 
covers in his thinking a further variety of Monistic Idealism, though 
holding with Professor Royce to Monism. For the Professor has 



54 MONISTIC IDEALISM, THE DOCTRINE OF PROFS. ROYCE AND MEZES. 

exercised such a fine reserve as to speak without much exposure of 
what his own philosophy is; he has confined himself very rigorously 
to a criticism of Professor Royce's apparatus of argument, and said 
next to nothing that tells what is his own conception of the Absolute 
Reality. Still, when he freely admits that Professor Royce's argu- 
ment inevitably proves an Ultimate Reality, and employs as an 
engine of criticism the premise that the inner life of our fellow-men 
— their aggregate of inner experiences, their feelings, thoughts, 
puzzles, aspirations; in short, their successive or simultaneous 
states of mind — ' ' exhausts and fathoms what we mean by 
our fellow-being," we naturally put this and that together, and 
conclude that he, too, holds the central doctrine of his latest 

J teacher — the doctrine that all existence is summed and resumed 
into the enfolding consciousness of one single Inclusive Self; that 
human selves, and other selves, if others there be, are not selves 
in at all the same sense that the Inclusive Self is, nor in the 
meaning that moral common-sense attaches to the word. They 
are mutually exclusive groups of empirical feelings — merely sum- 
maries, more or less partial and fragmentary, of separate items of 
experience, at best only partially organized. It is He that gives 
vital unity and real life to all, He alone that embraces all, penetrates 
and pervades all, and is genuinely organic; He alone is integral and 
one. Yet He is just as unquestionably all and many; his unity is 
not in the least excludent, not in the least repellent, but, on the 
contrary, is infinitely inclusive, absolutely ^//-embracing. Liter- 
ally, "His tender mercies are over all his works;" and whatever 
is at all, is his work, his act, directly. His being encompasses 
alike perfection and imperfection, evil and good, joy and anguish, the 
just and the unjust. His is the Harmony of discords actually pres- 
ent, but also actually dissolved; the Peace of conflicts at once raging 
and stilled; the Love that bears in the bosom of its utterly infinite 
benignity even malice itself, and atones for it with infinite Pity and 
by infinite Benevolence; his, finally, is the Eternal Penitence that 
repents of his sin in its very act, — nay, in its very germination, — and 
provides the Expiation as the very condition on which alone his 
offence is possible and actual. Such is the conception of absolute 
reality that has been set forth to us this evening with such resources 
of subtlety, of acuteness, of comprehensiveness, of possessions in 
weighty material, of almost boundlessly flexible expression; and we 



COMPLETE IDEALITY THE ONLY SURE SIGN OF REALITY. 55 

are asked to receive it as the philosophic account, the only account 
genuine and authentic, of the Conception of God. God, we are 
told, is that one and sole Absolute Experience, the utter union of 
Absolute Thought and Absolute Perception, of ideal and fact, in 
which all relative and partial experiences are directly taken up and 
included, though indeed reduced and dissolved, and to be some 
part of which is all that existence or reality means, or can mean, 
for anything else that claims to be, whether it be called material or 
mental. And that the God thus conceived is the only authentic 
God of philosophy is declared on the ground — or, rather, on the 
claim — that upon this conception alone can God be proved real. 
The conception — so our chief speaker's implication runs — may 
indeed be far different from what under an experience less organized 
than the philosophic, less brought to coherence, we had fancied the 
name God to mean; but what that name does mean must be exactly 
this, no more and no less: — That which rigorous thought, penetrat- 
ing to its inevitable and filial implications, can and does make out to 
be not merely Idea but Reality. Our master-question about it, 
Professor Royce would say, must not be whether we like it, nor 
whether it agrees with something we had supposed, but whether it 
is demonstrably true, and alone so demonstrable. 

With this last statement every mind sufficiently disciplined in 
philosophy to appreciate its true nature will of course agree. The 
philosophical conception of anything is the conception of it that 
thought attains when it takes utter counsel of its own utmost deep. 
For philosophy, accordingly, utter ideality and utter reality are 
reciprocal conceptions; complete and final agreement with thought, 
as thought sees itself whole, is the only test of reality, and, recip- 
rocally, that alone is sanely and soundly ideal which can be proved, 
— that is, to the total insight turns real. But in another and still 
more important reference, the definitive question is still to come; in 
fact, arises directly out of that great first question about every con- 
ception. That first, controlling question undoubtedly is: Can we 
prove the conception real, and thus alone show it is the right con- 
ception ? but the all-important question beyond will be: Are we now 
at length certain that we take the ideal view of the conception ? — ■ 
that the light in which we see it is indeed the light of the whole, the 
( final unit- vision under which alone our ideal can turn real ? Not 
until we are able to aver securely that this is so, have we a right to 



56 



IDEALISM OF THE PREVIOUS SPEAKERS INCOMPLETE. 



assert the conception as philosophic, and the only philosophic con- 
ception. Above all must they who have come to the insight that 
philosophy means Idealism — that mind is the measure of all things, 
and complete ideality the only sure sign of reality — hold themselves 
rigorously to this criterion. 

II. 

And, now, what I have to say about the conception of God 
that we have had so imposingly set forth this evening, — a concep- 
tion in which all the previous speakers, varying as they do, seem 
largely to agree, — what I have to say, at a stroke, is this: It does 
not seem to me to meet this criterion. As professed idealists, its 
advocates have come short of their calling. The doctrine is not 

^idealistic enough. No doubt it has long gone by the name of 
Absolute Idealism, the name conferred upon it by Hegel, the 
weighty and justly celebrated thinker who first gave it a well- 
organized exposition. But I venture to contest the propriety of the 
name, and maintain, rather, that an idealism of this character is not 
Absolute Idealism at all; that its exact fault is, not waiting for 
thought to take the fruitful roundness of its entire Ideal before de- 
claring its equivalence to the Real. 

In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, 
gladly and gratefully as I recognize the genuinely philosophic temper 
and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still 
moved to say that my honored colleagues, in this their common 
underlying conception, have to my mind all ' 1 missed the mark and 
come short of the glory of God.7 They have not seized nor 
expressed the Ideal of the Reason. *1 agree with them, that this Ideal 

>4s the sole measure and the certain sign of what reality is; I agree 
with Professor Royce, and with Hegel before him, that reality, in its 
turn, must be the test of the genuine Ideal, — that " whatever is real 
is rational, and whatever is ratio?ial is real; ' ' I agree that the Ideal 
is ipso facto the Real; but I insist that the vital question is, Have we 
stated the Ideal? I insist, further, that the conception of God ex- 
pounded with such lucid fulness by Professor Royce, and in various 
implications accepted by Professor Mezes and Dr. Le Conte, in its 
fundamental aspect at least, — that of the immanence of God in the 
world, — I insist that this falls fatally short of our rational Ideal, 
and is therefore, happily, only so far real as its limitations permit it 



THEIR CONCEPTION OF GOD REALLY THAT OF HIS CREATION. 57 

to be; for, by every idealist of course, some truth, some reality, must 
be accorded to all genuine thought, — it is all true, all real, as far as 
it goes. But the great concern is, just how far such a thought as 
has been offered us this evening does go on the lofty way to the 
Ideal; just what relative truth, what measure of partial reality, we 
shall assign it. And so I may restate my comment on this concep- 
tion of God by saying that, while on the one hand I see it come as 
far short of God's verity and God's existence as earth comes short 
of Heaven, as the creation comes short of the Creator, nevertheless, 
on the other hand, when expressed as Professor Royce expresses it, 
it does attain to the real nature of the real creation, and, when 
expressed as Dr. Le Conte would express it, to the real nature of the 
phenomenal aspect in the real creation, besides. 

In other words, the conception is a philosophical and reai 
account of the nature of an isolated human being, the numerical 
unit in the created universe, viewed as he appears in what has well 
been called his natural aspect; that is, as the organizing subject of 
a natural-scientific experience, characterized by fragmentariness that 
is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin 
a word to match the excellent German one erg'dnzi. The super- 
natural (that is to say, the completely rational) aspect of this being 
is here left out, — the aspect under which it is seen as the subject and 
cooperating organic cause of a moral i. e. completely rational or 
metaphysical experience; in which context the word Experience has 
suddenly changed its meaning in kind* and the human consciousness 
is seen to have, in its total unity, the all-encompassing form of a 
Conscience, — that Complete Reason, of a truly infinite sphere, in 
which the primal self- consciousness of the being actively posits (and 
so makes attainable in experience^ by reflective discovery) the Ideal 
which is its real self; sees itself as indeed a person — a self-active 
member of a manifold system of persons, all alike self-active in the 
inclusive unit of their being; all independent centres of origination, 
so far as efficient causation is concerned; all moving from "within," 
i. e. , from thought, and harmonized (not consolidated or mechanized) 
in a society of accordant free-agents, by the operation of what 

1 The principle here involved is a signal one in language, of vast significance philologi- 
callyaswell as philosophically, and deserves a study which it has never received. By it, 
words have a power of coming to mean the very opposite of what they were first used to 
denote. I believe it to be a fundamental law of vocabulary, imbedded in the very nature of 
language. 



5S 



THE TRUE IDEAL OF THE REASON THE CITY OF GOD. 



has been called, since Aristotle, final causation — the attraction of 
an Ideal Vision, the vision of that City of God which they consti- 
tute, and in which, reciprocally, they have their being; a vision 
immortalized by Dante as the Vision Beatific, by which no one is 
driven, but by which, to borrow the meaning of Goethe's famous 
line, the Eternal, womanlike, draws us onward, — 

"Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan." 

Now, it is greatly worth your notice, that this ideal is not merely 
the passing vision or phrased fancy of some poet, nor of some 
group of human beings in an accidental mood of rapt imagination. 
On the contrary, it is a great and solid matter of fact, of no less 
compass of reality than to deserve and require the name of historic. 
It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the 
very life of that highest stage of this, which we designate and praise 
by the name of Western Civilization. It is at the mental summons of 
this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges 
from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the 
West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic 
human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature 
and over his mere natural self, has its controlling and explanatory 
motive in this ideal alone. It is the very life-blood of that more 
vigorous moral order which is the manifest distinction of the West 
from the Orient. Personal responsibility and its correlate of free 
reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our 
enlightened civilization stands; and the voice of aspiring and suc- 
cessful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks 
ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and 
of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his 
citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We , 
are many, though indeed one ; there is one nature, in manifold 
persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establish- 
ment, of reality; unconditio?ial reality alone is sufficient to the being 
of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since moral 
order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, 
and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own 
acts. The entire political history of the West is a perpetual pro- 
gress of struggle toward a system of law establishing liberty, and a 
liberty habilitated and filled with stable contents by law. The 



THAT IDEAL THE HISTORIC CAUSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. 59 

emergence of western religion from oriental is similarly marked by 
the rise of this consciousness of individual and unconditional reality; 
we hear its presaging voice in that Hebrew prophet who declares : 
u Ye have said, the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's 
teeth are set on edge; but / say unto you, The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die." And the whole history of western theology, broken and 
incomplete and apparently tragic as it looks in the stage whither it 
has now at length come, is but the sincere and devout response of the 
human spirit to that inward ideal voice which announces the 
supremacy of reason and declares the unconditional reality and 
majesty of human nature as possessing it. Remove this supreme 
vision of this Republic of God, and western civilization, — nay, the 
whole of human history, which but culminates in it, is without 
intelligibility, having neither explanatory source nor goal. The 
central and real meaning of the Christian Religion, in which the 
self-consciousness of the West finds its true era, and which thus far 
has found no home except in the West, lies exactly in the faith that 
the Creator and the creature are reciprocally and equally real, not 
identical; that there is Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men; 
that God recognizes rights in the creature and acknowledges duties 
toward him; and that men are accordingly both unreservedly and 
also indestructibly real, — both free and immortal. In that religion 
alone, I venture to assert, is the union of this triad of faiths to be 
found — faiths that, while three, are inseparably one, since neither 
can be stated except in terms of the others. 

III. 

This brings me to notice Professor Royce's interesting state- 
ment, marked by such candour, at the close of his address. He 
traces briefly the philosophical and theological genealogy of his 
view, and expresses his belief that this view is at heart the thought 
really intended by the faith of the fathers, and in due time formulated 
in the conception of God set forth by that greatest and most 
accredited Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. This raises 
a nice question of exegesis, into which we cannot go with any fulness; 
but I will say, in passing, that if the statement is correct it only 
shows how far men's efforts to analyze and to formulate their 
highest and deepest practical insights fall short of the facts. It is 



* 



60 THE MONISTIC NOT THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF GOD. 

too true that much of the theology which professes and aims to be 
Christian, perhaps most of it, is in reality only the clothing or 
wrapping of Christianity in the pre-christian garments that have 
descended to the West as heirlooms from the East, or to the con- 
verted West as inheritances from its paganism. And we ought 
never to forget, therefore, that the real test of the faith of Christians 
is the implications in their religious conduct, and not at all their 
attempts, most likely unsuccessful, or at least unhappy, to analyze 
those implications and set them formally forth. In these attempts, 
transmitted beliefs quite below the Christian level, accepted and 
continued habits of ritual, and modes of feeling, that are nothing 
but survivals from the faiths which the new vision in Christ would 
forever put away, will inevitably play a large part. They have in fact 
played too large a part; a part so large, that the thought which Jesus 
imparted to mankind, and which has survived and nourished in spite 
of them, has been hidden quite from view in the wrappages compacted 
out of these pre-christian materials, — materials for the most part 
drawn from the Orient, whence they came from the religions and 
philosophies the very remotest from the Glad Tidings proclaimed 
by Christ. The spirit of all these was pantheistic, in the truly 
unchristian sense of that word: they were all preoccupied with the 
sovereign majesty of the Almighty, the mystery of the Impenetrable 
Source, and knew nothing of the infinite Graciousness or the ever- 
lasting Love. Their monotonous theme was the ineffable greatness 
of the Supreme Being and the utter littleness of man. Their tradi- 
tion lay like a pall upon the human spirit, — nay, it lies upon it to 
this day, — and it smothers now, as it smothered then, the voice 
that answers there to the call of Jesus : Son of Man, thou art the 
son of God. Rouse, heart! put on the garments of thy majesty, 
and realize thy equal, thy free, thy immortal membership in the 
Eternal Order! Under the suffocating burden of the old things 
that should have passed away, the Christian consciousness forgets, 
at least in part, that all things are become new, and that man is 
risen from the dead. 

It is not enough, then, for vindicating as Christian the con- 
ception of God offered us to-night, to show, for instance, that St. 
Thomas held it, if so be he did. In my own opinion, which you must 
take for what you will, he quite escapes its objectionable traits in 
some regards, and, were he here to explain himself, would disclaim 



MONISTIC THEISM, EVEN IF ARISTOTELIAN, STILL PANTHEISTIC. 6 1 

that interpretation of the Divine immanence in the world, and the 
reciprocal immanence of the world in God, which is characteristic 
of both the philosophies expounded here this evening. At the 
same time, his resting his own conception of God on the foundations 
of Aristotle, in the form which the great Greek succeeded in giving 
them, — a form which comes so short of Aristotle's greatest philo- 
sophical hints, — is occasion enough for thinkers like Hegel and our 
chief speaker to see a great resemblance between St. Thomas's view 
and theirs, and to overlook the contradiction between these aspects 
of his doctrine and those in which he reflects the Christian apergu 
of genuine creation, and the consequent distinctness of the world 
from God. This ought to carry as a corollary the unqualified free- 
dom of men in the City of God; and if St. Thomas fails to draw 
that corollary, the explanation must be sought in his prepossession 
by the older and pre-christian tradition. Aristotle, after justifiable 
criticism of Plato's course with the world of Ideas, unquestionably 
struck into a new path more thoroughly idealistic. Had he 
explored this far enough, and with close enough scrutiny, it must 
have led him beyond pantheistic idealism. But his doctrine that the 
criterion of deity is Omniscience, and that creation is simply the 
divine Still Vision — deoipia — had its discussion arrested too early 
to admit of that achievement The descent of the doctrine we have 
heard to-night is correctly traced from Aristotle's; and the doctrine 
does not get essentially beyond his, nor attain any distinction 
between the Creator and the creation sufficient to make out creation 
as creation at all. 

I venture, you see, to dissent from Professor Royce when he 
claims that the conception of God — if God we may name it — afforded 
by his monistic idealism is distinctly theistic instead of pantheistic. 
Unquestionably, "it is not the conception of any Unconscious 
Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of an Universal 
Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an 
Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore." But we do 
not escape pantheism, and attain to theism, by the easy course of 
excluding the Unconscious, or the sole Substance, or an inscrutable 
Mystery, from the seat of the Absolute. We must go farther, and 
attain to the distinct reality, the full otherhood> of the creation; so\/ 
that there shall be no confusion of the creature with the Creator, 
nor any interfusion of the Creator with the creature. Above all, we 



62 MONISTIC IDEALISM IDENTIFIES CREATOR AND CREATURE, 

must attain to the moral reality of the creature, which means his 
self-determining freedom not merely with reference to the world of 
sense, but also with reference to the Creator, and must therefore 
include his imperishable existence. The conception set forth to-night 
is certainly not that of an Unconscious; it is certainly not that of a 
mere Substance, to which our independence is subjected by sheer 
physical law; and it is certainly not a Mystery, in the sense of 
having a nature made up of traits wholly strange to our human 
cognition. For its essence is intelligence, and that omniscient; and 
hence its activity is not by transmission in space; and, finally, 
consciousness (or, as Professor Royce would apparently prefer 
to say, experience) is the very thing we are most experienced 
in, and so best acquainted with. But if the Infinite Self includes us 
all, and all our experiences, — sensations and sins, as well as the 
rest, — in the unity of one life, and includes us and them directly; if 
there is but one and the same final Self for us each and all; then, 
j(vith a literalness indeed appalling, He is we, and we are He; nay, 

vHe is I, and /am He. And I think it will appear later, from the 
nature of the argument by which the Absolute Reality as Absolute 
Experience is reached, that the exact and direct way of stating the 
case is baldly: I am He. Now, if we read the conception in the 
first way, what becomes of our ethical independence ? — what, of our 
personal reality, our righteous i.e. reasonable responsibility — respon- 
sibility to which we ought to be held ? Is not He the sole real 
agent ? Are we anything but the steadfast and changeless modes of 
his eternal thinking and perceiving ? And if we read the conception 
in the second way, what becomes of Him 9 Then, surely, He is but 
another name for me; or, for any one oiyou, if you will. And how 
can there now be talk of a Moral Order, since there is but a single 
mind in the case? — we cannot legitimately call that mind a person. 
This vacancy of moral spirit in the Absolute Experience when read 
off from the end of the particular self, is what Professor Mezes 
pertinently strikes at in the first of his two points of criticism. 
Judging by experience alone, — the only point of view allotted by 
Professor Royce to the particular self, — judging merely by that, 
even when the experience is not direct and naive but comparatively 

J organized, there is no manifold of selves; the finite self and the 
Infinite Self are but two names at the opposite poles of one lonely 
reality, which from its isolation is without possible moral significance. 



AND SO MIGHT LEGITIMATELY BE CALLED SOLIPSISM. 



63 



This is doubtless a form of Idealism, for it states the Sole Reality 
in terms of a case of self-consciousness. When read off in the 
second way, it has been known in the history of philosophy as 
Solipsism. 1 To read it so is a harsh redudio, and rather unfair, as 
it can equally well be read in the other way. But that other way 
is the only way of escape from what our moral common-sense pro- 
nounces an intolerable absurdity. It bears the more dignified name^ 
of Monistic Idealism, or Idealistic Monism. If it is to be called a 
conception of God at all, it is the conception that presents God as 
All and in all. If the syllables theism can be affixed to it at all, they 
can only be so as part of the correcter name Pantheism. And so 
it seems to me that we can by no means assent when Professor 
Royce is disposed to insist that every ethical predicate which the 
highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable 
of exact interpretation in terms of his view. Where is the attribute ^ 
of Grace, the source of that Life Eternal which alone knows God as 
true God, according to the Fourth Gospel, and which is freedom 
and immortality? 

IV. 

But, after all, what we have now for some minutes been saying 
amounts only to a contrast between different conceptions, and, at 
last, to a mere dispute over names. For philosophy, nothing is 
settled by settling any number of such things. The real question 
is, not whether we like or dislike the view before us ; not whether it 
is Christian, or Thomistic, or Aristotelian; but simply, is it true? 
Professor Royce or Hegel might well turn upon us and ask : Is not 
God a name for the Ultimate Reality ; and is it not demonstrable 
that the conception in question is the Ultimate Reality? — has it not 
been so demonstrated here and to-night? If this is the conception 
of the Absolute; if the Absolute must be the Omniscient, or, in 
other words, the Absolute Experience ; has not this ideal of an Abso- 
lute Experience demonstrated itself to be real, by the clear showing 
that the supposition of its unreality, if affirmed real, commits us to 
its reality? — in short, that the real supposition of its unreality is a 
self-contradiction, and therefore impossible to be made? 

To this, I will venture to say, as the first step in a reply: The 



1 From solus ipse (he himself alone), as the appropriate name for the theory that no 
being other than the thinker himself is real. 



64 MONISTIC IDEALISM VALID AS CHECKING AGNOSTICISM, 

gist of the proof is the proposition, that a supposition which turns 
out to be impossible, or, in other words, which cannot really be 
made, — and hence never is really made, — affords no footing for a 
dispute; in such case, the opposite supposition is the only one 
tenable; we are in presence of a thought which our mind thinks in 
only one way, so that it cannot, and in reality does not, have any 
alternative or opposed thought at all. Such a thought is sometimes 
called necessary; and then the question will inevitably arise: Is the 
necessity objective, or is it merely subjective? — is such a thought the 
infallible witness of how reality has to be, or merely the unimpeacha- 
ble witness of how the thinker has to think? — is it the sign of real 
power and genuine knowledge, or only of lifnitation and impenetra- 
ble ignorance ? Here, the agnostic says it is the latter ; the idealist, 
it is the former; and then the idealist undertakes to show, once more, 
that the supposition of thought being really limited and merely sub- 
jective is a flat self-contradiction, a proposition inevitably withdrawn 
in the very act of putting it. Then, to clinch the case finally, if his 
idealism is only of the type here emerging, he makes haste to add: 
The fact is, you see, the thinker, to think at all, unavoidably asserts 
his thinking to be the exhaustive and all-embracing Reality, the Un- 
conditioned that founds all conditions and imparts to things con- 
ditioned whatever reality they have, the Absolute in and through 
which things relative are really relative and relatively real, the im- 
mutable IS that is implied in every if. In short, reality turns out 
to be, exactly, the thinker plus presentation to the thinker; but, 
then, and let us not forget it, says this species of idealist, the thinker 
is reciprocally in immutable relation to this presentation, this detail, 
this fragmentary serial experience, these contents of sense. Thus 
we come to what Hegel called the Absolute Idea, as the absolute 
identity of Subject and Object, and the inseparable synthesis of the 
single Omniscient Mind, and its system of ideas, with its multiplicity 
of fragmentary i. e. sensible objects. And so the inevitable and 
everlasting truth is, not Agnosticism, but Absolute Idealism — the 
ism of the Absolute Idea ; not the Unknowable Power, but the Self- 
knowing Mind who is at once one and all, the one Creator inclusive 
of the manifold creation. 

And now let me continue such reply to this as I would make, by 
saying, next, how altogether acute and sound I think it is as a supple- 
ment to that phase of merely subjective idealism which now goes by 



BUT CANNOT REALLY SURMOUNT SUBJECTIVITY. 



65 



the name of Agnosticism — a supplement exposing the misnomer in 
virtue of which such agnostic idealism calls the Ultimate Reality the 
Unknowable, when yet it has no footing upon which to affirm the 
reality of the Inscrutable Power except the self-asserted authority of 
thought, — the " i7iconceiv ability of the opposite," as Mr. Spencer 
calls it, — by which he undoubtedly means, as we all see after his 
famous discussion of this Axiom with Mr. Mill, the unthinkableness 
of the opposite. The real meaning of the situation is, — as I believe 
Professor Royce to have shown unanswerably, and more lucidly than 
anybody else has ever shown it, — that the thinker is just unavoidably 
affirming his own all -conditioning reality as critic, as judge, as or- 
ganizer, and as appraiser of values, in and over the field of his pos- 
sible experience; the thinking self is seen to be the very condition 
of the possibility of even a fragmentary and seemingly incoherent 
or isolated experience, and the all-coherent unity of its inevitable 
reality passes ceaseless sentence on the mere phenomenon, declares 
the isolation and fragmentariness of this to be only apparent, sup- 
plants the incoherence of its immediate aspect by coherence that 
marches ever wider and higher, and so places the phenomenon in a 
real system that takes it out of the category of illusion by giving it 
a continual and endlessly ascending approximation to unqualified 
reality. Thus the Ultimate Reality actually posited and possibly 
positable by this procedure is, indeed, the Unconditioned Condi- 
tioner with reference to a possible experience, but is unwittingly 
miscalled when called the Unknowable, for it is in precise fact just 
the Self-knowing Knower, — the comprehensive and active Supreme 
Judgment in whose light alone the things of experience are as they 
are, since they are, as they are, only as they are presented at its bar 
and there get ever more and more known. 

But now I ask you to notice, next, how this argument, unan- 
swerable as it is for displacing the phantom of the Unknowable and 
discovering the idealism concealed in the philosophy that calls itself 
Agnosticism, nevertheless leaves us unrescued from an idealism still 
merely subjective, though subjective in another and a somewhat higher 
sense. I mean, that the argument, taken strictly in itself, supplies 
no reason for reading off the resulting Reality from the point of view 
of its infinite inclusiveness, its supposed universal Publicity, rather 
than from that of its finite exclusiveness, its undeniable particular 
Privacy. Here I agree, as I have already once indicated, with the 



66 



NOR CAN MONISTIC IDEALISM ATTAIN TO A MORAL WORLD. 



brunt of the first criticism made on the argument by Professor 
Mezes, and with his ground for the criticism: the argument is so 
cast and based, that no provision is made for a public of thinkers. 
In terms of this form of Idealism, no manifold 'of selves is provided for, 
or can be provided for; and this I would conclude, not only as Profes- 
sor Mezes does, from the limited scope assigned by such idealism to 
the illative principle of Causality, but also from the incompatibility of 
Self- completeness, as the argument has to conceive of this, with the 
Goodness that it would fain vindicate for its Absolute. In short, I 
agree with Professor Mezes again, in his second criticism, — that the 
Self- completeness reached by the argument cannot amount to Good- 
ness ; though I may say, in passing, that I would not argue this on 
that fascinating but dreamy ground of the illusion declared inherent 
in time, the validity of which I very much doubt, but on the ground, 

V^once more, that the Self- completeness fails to provide for any mani- 
fold of selves either phenomenal or noumenal, and that the very 
meaning of Goodness, if Goodness is moral, depends on the reality 
of such a public of selves. While I should dissent, too, from Pro- 
fessor Mezes in his implication that absolute Goodness must have 
the trait of progressive improvement, I hold that its very meaning 
is lost unless there is a society of selves, to every one of whom 
Goodness, to be Divine, must allot an unconditional reality and 
maintain it with all the resources of infinite wisdom. I repeat: My 
point against Professor Royce's argument, and against the whole 
post- Kantian method of construing Idealism, summed up by Hegel 
and supplied by him with organizing logic, is this : By the argument, 
— as by many another form of stating Hegel's view, — reading off its 
result as Idealistic Monism (or Cosmic Theism, if that name be pre- 
ferred) rather than as Solipsism, is left without logical justification. 
* The preference for the more imposing reading, it seems to me, rests 
on no principle that the argument can furnish, but on an instinctive 
response to the warnings of moral common-sense. No matter what 
show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive though 
unfathomed moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem 
that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its 

^cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and abso- 
lute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, 
such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. By spon- 
taneous moral sense we doubtless believe, indeed, that we are each 



royce's argument, read strictly, proves only solipsism. 67 

entirely real, and a seat of inalienable rights; but this feeling of 
rights, though it be no more than a resentment at invasion, points 
directly to our belief that there are other beings as unreservedly real 
as we, with rights alike inalienable, who lay us under duty. Still, 
this uncomprehended instinct, ethical though it be, is not philoso- 
phy. Until we shall have learned how to give it in some way the 
authority of rational insight, we have no right to its effects when we 
are proceeding as thinkers; so far as we merely accept them, we 
do not think, we only feel. 

Moved by this feeling, I say, we evade reading the result of 
this strange but striking dialectic as Solipsism, and, reading it from 
the reverse direction, we are fain to call it Cosmic Theism, under 
the silent assumption that its real contents are thus enlarged so that 
its embrace enfolds a universe of mi?ids. And yet these so-called 
persons are rightly designated as only finite selves, mutually relative 
and phenomenal merely, since the reality of the unifying Organic 
Experience, as reached by the argument, requires that it shall be 
strictly one and indivisible, and that the supposed manifold of finite 
selves shall none of them have any real and changeless Self but this. 
One single Infinite Self, the identical and sole active centre of all 
these quasi selves, which are severally made up of specific groups 
of experiences more or less fragmentary, as the case may be, none 
of them with any inner organic unity of its own, — this is the 
theory; and even for this hollow shell of a personal and moral 
order we have no logical warrant, but have silently carried it in, 
over our argument, on the hint of moral sense that of course there 
are manifold centres (or, at any rate, manifold groups) of experience 
besides our own. 

You will not, I hope, mistake my point. Like Professor 
Mezes, I am by no means saying that Professor Royce may not 
have somewhere in the rich and crowded arsenal of his thinking 
some other means of dealing with this question of the moral contents 
of the Absolute than the means presented in his address and his 
books; I am only saying that, so far as I can see, they are not pro- 
vided anywhere in those; and especially not in the curiously im- 
pressive argument which he has now restated so lucidly for us, and 
which makes, one may say, the very life of the philosophy that he 
sets forth in print. 



68 



THE ARGUMENT, ANALYZED IN DETAIL, 



V. ✓* 

And now let us look for a moment at the exact structure of that 
argument, and determine, if we can, precisely what it does make 
out. It may be put in two quite different ways, each brief and 
telling : — 

(1) Our human ignorance, once confessed to be real, brings 
with it the reality of an Absolute Wisdom, since nothing less than 
that can possibly declare the ignorance real; — if the ignorance is 
real, then Omniscience is real. 

(2) Our human knowledge, that indirect and organized 
experience which constitutes science, once admitted to be real, 
brings with it the reality of an Absolute Experience, since nothing 
less than that can possibly give sentence that one experience when 
compared with another is really fallacious, and this is exactly 
what science does ; — if the 4 ( verdict of science ' ' is real, then an 
Absolute Experience is real. 

Now, the question that unavoidably arises, on exactly consid- 
ering these two unusual reasonings, is this : Whose omniscience is it 
that judges the ignorance to be real? — whose absolute experience 
pronounces the less organized experience to be really fallacious? 
Well, — whosesoever it may be, it is certainly acting in and through 
my judgment, if I am the thinker of that argument; and in every 
case it is /who pronounce sentence on myself as really ignorant, or 
on my limited experience as fallacious. Yes, — and it is / who 
am the authority, and the only direct authority, for the connection 
put between the reality of the ignorance or of the fallacious 
experience on the one hand and the reality of the implicated 
omniscience on the other. We can perhaps see the case more 
clearly as it is, if we notice that the argument is cast in the 
form of a conditional syllogism, and runs in this wise: If my ignor- 
ance is real, then Omniscience is real; but my ignorance assuredly is 
real; and, therefore, so also is Omniscience. Now we ask, Who is 
the authority for the truth of the hypothetical major premise, and 
who is the authority for the truth of the categorical minor? Who con- 
joins, in that clutch of adamant, the reality of the ignorance with the 
reality of the omniscience? And whose omniscience makes the 
assertion valid that my ignorance is real? Is it not plain that / who 
am convincing myself by that syllogism am the sole authority for 



REFUTES AGNOSTICISM BY PROVING THE THINKER'S OMNISCIENCE. 69 

both the premises? Though there were a myriad other omnis- 
ciences, they were of no avail to me, in the lone inward struggle to 
my own conviction through that argumentative form, unless they 
interpenetrated my judgment, and so became literally mine; or, if 
you prefer, unless my judgment vanished upward and was annulled 
into that Infinite Judgment. In using either premise as proof of the 
conclusion, and a fortiori in using both, I implicate myself in 
actual omniscience; I am verily guilty of that effrontery, if effrontery 
it really be. So must the great argument of this evening be read, 
it seems to me, or else it must mean nothing. In short, it is the 
introversive act of a reasoning being, discovering the real infinity 
that lies implicit in his seeming finitude. It is just / in my counter 
aspect — my reverse instead of my obverse, my other-side of 
infinite judicialness — coming forward to execute my proper act of 
infallible certainty. In such an "affectation of omniscience," un- 
questionably, does any and every least assumption of certainty in a 
judgment involve the thinker who makes it. This, to my mind, is 
the exact and whole meaning of Professor Royce's proof, unless we 
grant him the gratuitous assumption of an indefinite multitude of 
simultaneous or successive thinkers; and this, surely, we must not 
do when we are professing the philosophical temper of " proving 
all things." 

There are those, no doubt, who would see in the phase that 
the argument is now made to assume, only a fine occasion for very 
knowing smiles. Chief among such, of course, are the agnostics in 
whose especial behoof the argument was contrived out of their own 
chosen materials, with the benign intent of disciplining them out of 
their scepticism, through chastening supplied by exposed self-contra- 
diction. They are likely now saying to themselves : ' ' The argument 
has proved a little too much; it reinforces our point very happily: 
he who would not cut the absurd figure of claiming omniscience 
must take the lowly role of our humble philosophy — the role of con- 
fessed ignorance and incurable uncertainty." But such is not the 
way in which I would read the lesson. Indeed, I hear infancy, even 
now, the author of this singular argument saying to these jubilant 
doubters: ''Well, — confessed ignorance, and uncertainty really 
incurable it is, is it? Here's at you again, then! And there you 
go round in the resistless dialectical whirligig once more! And so 
will your cheerfully obdurate negative send you whirling on perpet- 



70 CALLING OUR INFALLIBLE JUDGMENT GOD IS MYSTICISM. 

ually!" And in that saying I should quite agree, and I am sure 
that you would, also. It is not to the force or validity of the argu- 
ment that I object, but to the misinterpretation of its scope. It is a 
clinching dialectical thumbscrew for the torture of agnostics; yes, 
with reference to them and their unavoidable stadium of thinking, 
it is even a step of value in the struggle of the soul toward a convic- 
tion of its really infinite powers and prospects; but I cannot see in 
it any full proof of the real being of God. Strictly construed, it is, 
as I have just endeavored to show, simply the vindication of that 
active sovereign judgment which is the light of every mind, which 
organizes even the most elementary perceptions, and which goes on 
in its ceaseless critical work of reorganization after reorganization, 
building all the successive stages of science, and finally mastering 
those ultimate implications of science that constitute the insights of 
philosophy. If I call that active all-illumining judgment, — which 
is indeed my life and my light, and which shines, and will shine, 
unto my perfect day, and is for me in all the emergencies of experi- 
ence an ever-present and practicable omniscience, or fountain of 
unfailing certainty, — if I call that God, then assuredly I am employ- 
ing the mood of the mystic; nay, I am taking literally what he took 
only mystically; I am translating into the cold forms of logic, where 
it becomes meaningless, what his religious poesy and enthusiasm 
made a practical medium of exalted religious feeling, though it was 
philosophically nought. This light within may indeed prove to be 
the witness of God in my being, but it is not God himself. 

It is often said of the mystics, whether within Christendom or 
in Egypt or in the elder Orient which was and still remains their 
proper home, that they have the high religious merit of bringing 
God near to us, — as if they met the saying of St. Paul: Though He 
be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and 
have our being. But nearness may become near. When it is made 
to mean absolute identity, then all the worth of true nearness is 
gone, — the openness of access, the freedom of converse, the joy of 
true reciprocity. These precious things all draw their meaning 
from the distinct reality of ourselves and Him who is really other 
than we. When mysticism plays in high poesy on the theme of the 
Divine Nearness, in the mood that " sees God in clouds and hears 
Him in the wind," it quickens religious emotion, but affords no 
genuine illumination in theology. When we turn that mood into 



MYSTICISM MADE LITERAL DESTROYS MORAL FREEDOM. J I 

literal philosophy, and cause our centre of selfhood to vanish into 
God's, or God's to vanish into ours, we lose the tone of religion 
that is true and wholesome. For true religion is built only on the s/ 
firm foundations of duty and responsibility; and these, again, rest 
only on the footing of freedom. Hence the passing remark of Dr. 
LeConte on the nature of religion, though indeed beautiful and 
noble, is yet, I think, neither noble enough nor beautiful enough. It 
certainly ascends beyond the famous saying by Matthew Arnold, of 
which as a ladder it makes happy use, — that " religion is morality 
touched with emotion;" for Dr. LeConte rightly reminds us that 
the emotion which is religious must not merely touch and kindle 
but must vivify, and must be not simply emotion but noble emo- 
tion. But it seems to me that his saying, like Arnold's, still 
leaves the true relations inverted. Yes, as much as inverted; be- 
cause, in truth, religion is not morality touched and vivified by 
noble emotion, but, rather, religion is emotion touched by morality, 
and at that wondrous touch not merely ennobled but actually 
raised from the dead — uplifted from the grave of sense into the life 
eternal of reason. For life eternal is life germinating in that true 
and only Inclusive Reason, the supreme consciousness of the reality 
of the City of God, — the Ideal that seats the central reality of each 
human being in an eternal circle of Persons, and establishes each as a 
free citizen in all the all-founding, all- governing Realm of Spirits. 
So is it that religion can only draw its breath in the quickening air 
of moral freedom, and our great poet's word comes strictly true, — 

" So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
So near is God to man, 
When duty whispers low, Thou must, 
The youth replies, / can." 

And thus I am led to repeat, that the main argument of this even- 
ing, striking as it is, does not establish any Reality suffrcingly relig- 
ious, — does not establish the being of God. This will continue true 
of it, for the reasons just pointed out, even if we grant that the Infinite 
Self is a unity inclusive of an indefinite multitude of quasi selves. 
Accordingly, for the sake of argument, this grant shall be made 
during the rest of the discussion. 



72 royce's conception failing, will le conte's answer better? 

VI. 

And now, in view of the phase last assumed by our question, 
we naturally turn to the other system of Idealism offered us — that 
of Dr. Le Conte; for its very object seems to be, to provide for 
the desired world of freedom. It certainly accepts one aspect of the 
theory from which we have just parted — the immanence of God in 
Nature; interpreted, too, pretty much in the way that Professor 
Royce and other Hegelians interpret it. But, this accepted, Dr. 
Le Conte's view is apparently an attempt to supplement it by such a 
use of the theory of evolution as shall establish a conception of the 
Ultimate Reality which will thoroughly answer to the Vision Beat- 
ific — the conception of a World of Spirits, all immortal, and all 
genuinely real because themselves centres of origination and thus 
really free; not that they now are so, in the present order of Nature 
where we see them, but that the evolutional account of their origin 
clearly indicates that they will become so. Characteristic of this 
new form of Idealism, is its effort to unite the Hegelian form with 
the form that I have been trying to set before you, — the monistic 
form with the pluralistic. Its means for this union is, the method 
it takes to prove the coming reality of the City of God — the 
Realm of Ends. This is presented as the goal toward which cosmic 
evolution is seen unmistakably to tend; and its reality is argued 
partly by induction, partly by appeal to that moral reason which 
would pronounce evolution futile, should its indicated goal not be 
fulfilled in an endless life whereby the self-activity only presaged 
here could be realized in the hereafter. This large reconciling office 
is what I suppose Dr. Le Conte to intend; and before taking our 
final look at the theory of Professor Royce, we must pause to see 
whether this attractive new scheme may not have supplanted it; or, 
perchance, whether this, too, is to prove disappointing. 

I confess that by the lucid force of Dr. Le Conte's reasonings, 
and the great beauty of his conclusions, I am constantly tempted to 
yield him my entire assent. It is only by the low murmurs of half- 
suppressed conviction, that I am roused from that state of fascina- 
tion, to take up again the task of rigid thought. But if I may 
venture at all upon criticism of a thinker so justly distinguished, 
whose mind I sincerely revere, then I will say that the stability of his 
system depends, I think, on two things: (i) Whether it provides a 



ITS PROOF OF A COSMIC MIND INSUFFICIENT. 



73 



sufficient proof that the Immanent Energy which is the cause of 
evolution is indeed a Cosmic Consciousness; (2) whether a Cosmic 
Consciousness, even if real, having— as it must have — the attribute of 
immanence in Nature, is compatible with the freedom and the per- 
sonal immortality at which the system aims. 

Regarding the first of these, I feel bound to say that the proof 
offered for the Cosmic Consciousness seems to me insufficient. All 
I am able to make of it is this : The analogy in the case of each of 
us, who knows that he is conscious, though to the outside observer 
there is nothing of him discernible but phenomena purely physical; 
— still more, the analogy of the reasoning by which each extends 
this assurance of his own reality, to interpret similar physical phe- 
nomena into the existence of other persons, animating bodies like 
his own; — these analogies would, in all reason, lead us to say that 
there might well be a. Cosmic Mind animating all Nature, but by no 
means that there is such a Mind. True enough, there is the same 
kind of reason for believing in such a Mind as for believing in the 
minds of our fellow-men, — if, indeed, the real warrant for this belief 
be only the warrant of analogy. But, even on that warrant, the 
value of the analogy will finally depend on the degree to which we 
can match, in Nature as a whole, the test phenomena that prompt us „ 
to conclude the existence of human minds besides our own. The 
chief of these tests are speech and purposive movement; and, Bishop 
Berkeley's captivating metaphors about them notwithstanding, the 
literal fact is that Nature answers to neither; or, rather, we have no 
means of ascertaining, from her, whether she does or not. 

Coming to the second question, I find myself in still greater 
difficulties. I cannot see how a Cosmic Consciousness, with its 
intrinsic immanence in Nature, can be reconciled with real freedom 
at all; and its consistency with an immortality truly personal is to 
me beset with obscure alternatives, between which either the cer- 
tainty or else the value of the life to come vanishes away. 
Whether we take the immanence of God in Nature to mean his om- 
nipresence in and throiighout Nature, — which is something unin- 
telligible, — or whether we say, in consonance with Idealism, 
that Nature is immanent in God, the doctrine implies that God 
operates evolution, including the evolution of man in every aspect 
of his being, by direct causation — by his own immediate efficiency. 
Any secondary causes that may operate — though according to the 



74 ITS IMMANENT GOD ANNULS FREEDOM AND PERSONAL IMMORTALITY. 

theory of evolution these are indeed real and infinitely complex — are 
only mediate or transmissive, and are not true causes; God must 
ever remain the only real agent. In short, we have again a system 
of Monism; and all the hostilities to the strict personality of created 
minds that we found in the doctrine of Professor Royce are on our 
hands once more. And if it be said that just here it is that the 
philosophic virtue of evolution displays itself, by showing us that 
the world of efficient causation is only a means to an end coming 
beyond it, to whose realization it surely points, — showing us that 
full self-activity, real freedom, is the plain goal, which moreover 
can only be won through immortality, — then I am led to ask: How 
will the goal be attained ? I ask myself: So long as man remains 
a term in Nature, how can he ever escape from that causal embrace 
in which Nature is held immanent in God ? This very immanence 
in God will no doubt maintain in existence some form of Nature, as 
long as God himself exists; and thus I can easily conceive of the 
human spirit as going on in its share of the everlasting existence of 
Nature. But I also see that this must be at the cost of its freedom. 
For in the one and only life of the Cosmic Consciousness, brooding 
upon Nature and upon all her offspring alike, there is after all but 
one real agent, and that is the Consciousness itself. On the other 
hand, were I to suppose — as some of Dr. LeConte's writings have 
at times seemed to mean — were I to suppose that death is the sub- 
lime moment in which our connection with Nature at length comes 
to a close, and is thus in its truth the moment of birth for the freed 
spirit, so that by death the long toil of spirit-creation is completed, 
I should indeed be at first rapt away by this surprising suggestion; 
especially by the Platonic afterthought, that now the soul, set forth 
in her self-sufficing independence, is proof against all assaults for- 
ever, and has become indeed imperishable. But a second after- 
thought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature 
of this life dissevered from Nature, — bodiless, void of all sense-per- 
ception ? What would be left in it except the pure elements of rea- 
son, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of 
science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, 
but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other indi- 
vidual mind, but of the universal human nature ? And what is that 
universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Conscious- 
ness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving 



LE CONTE'S VIEW FAILING, WHAT OF ROYCE'S ARGUMENT, FINALLY ? 75 

the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me 
wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has resolved me back into 
the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be 
fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation, — 

" that which came from out the boundless Deep 

Turns again home." 

Shall I ever issue forth again from that Inane? Will that 
unfathomable Void ever create again ? — ever again enfold an embo- 
somed Nature, to repeat again through her fertility the stupendous 
drama of evolution ? To ask such questions is to realize how utterly 
we have left the native regions of our occidental thinking; how lost 
we are among the most shadowy conceptions of the Orient. And 
no matter which alternative we take; no matter whether we main- 
tain Nature everlastingly, and as parts of Nature win an endless 
continuance, but remain forever destitute of freedom, mere aggre- 
gates of " inherited tendency " organized and moved by some new 
and heightened touch from the ever-immanent God; or, on the other 
hand, by severance from Nature win the empty name of freedom, 
and vanish in a nominal immortality that only means absorption into 
the Eternal Inane; — in either case the so-called God is not a Per- 
sonal God, since in neither does he stand in any relations of mutual 
responsibility and duty with other real agents. Thus I cannot see 
that this Evolutional Idealism makes any secure advance beyond 
the Monism which it seeks to amend. We appear to be left to that, 
after all; and for proof of it, to some such argument as that of our 
evening's chief speaker. 

VII. 

And what, now, are we to say of this, finally ? What are we to 
say to the claim that the surprising but in some sort irresistible 
conception reached by that argument must be accepted as the philo- 
sophical conception of God, be our spontaneously religious concep- 
tion of that Being as different from this as it may? This claim is 
rested on the two premises, (i) that no conception of God can have 
any philosophical value unless it can be proved real, or, in other 
words, unless it is the conception that of itself proves God to exist ; 
and (2) that the conception discussed before us is the only concep- 
tion that can thus prove its reality. The first of these, as I have 
already said to you earlier, nobody with a proper training in philos- 



j6 KANTIAN ASSUMPTION AT THE BASIS OF THE ARGUMENT. 

ophy would deny. The second has a very different standing, and 
I take but little risk, I am sure, when I question its truth entirely. 

Why, then, should such an assumption be made ? I answer : 
Because of a still deeper assumption; namely: that, since the think- 
ing of Kant, the sole terms on which thought can be objectively 
valid are settled beyond revision. The thinking being, it is here 
said, cannot possibly get beyond itself ; there is no way, therefore, 
by which thought can reach reality; — unless, indeed, reality is 
something within the whole and true compass of the thinker's own 
being, as contrasted with its merely apparent and partial compass. 
Thought, this view goes on to say, must either surrender all claims 
to establish reality and to know it, or else it must cease to regard 
reality as a thing -in-itself ; so things-in-themselves are dismissed 
from critical philosophy, and henceforth thought and reality must 
be conceived as inseparably conjoined. But how alone is such a 
conjunction conceivable? — how alone is the validity of thought 
specifically possible? To this it is answered: There is no way of 
having the required conjunction but by presupposing the unity of 
the thinker's self- consciousness to be intrinsically a synthetical unity 
— a unity, that is, conjoining in itself two correlated streams of con- 
sciousness. These are, the abstractly ideal and the abstractly real, 
mere thought and mere sense, mere idea and dead fact. Torn from 
the life-giving embrace of this true unity of self-consciousness, neither 
of these correlates has any true reality at all, — any meaning, any 
growth, any being. And, reciprocally, there can be no real unity 
of self-consciousness apart from its living expression in this pair of 
correlates. No knowledge — no objective certainty — is possible, if 
once this magic bond be broken. The price of knowledge, the 
price of certitude, is this inseparable union of concept with percept, 
of thought with sense. Sever the idea from its sensory comple- 
ment, and it vanishes in the inane. The only true Ideal is the Real- 
Ideal, is the unity presupposed in this correlation, and embracing 
it, — the unity implied in every item of experience, which is always » 
just a case of this synthesis, — the unity still more profoundly 
implicated in every colligated group of experiences and in that 
progressively organized experience which ascends the pathway of 
science by perpetual criticism of experience less organized, and per- 
petual detection of ignorance. The Real-Ideal thus turns out to 
be that Omniscience which is the eternal clutch holding together 



EVEN WERE THIS VALID, CONSCIENCE WOULD REJECT ITS RESULT. 77 

the two sides of experience, and holding all possible forms and stages 
of experience in its life-giving, knowledge-assuring, reality-building 
grasp. Grant the accuracy and the necessity of the fundamental 
premise, — grant the truth of this inseperable union of pure thought 
with sense, of this interdependence of the rational and the sensory, — 
and the case is closed. The immanent Omniscience is then made 
real, in this overspanning meaning of that word, and nothing but 
such an immanent Omniscience can be made out real. 

There is the whole anatomy of the argument in brief. If its 
fundamental premise is true, it is certainly unanswerable; and we 
shall be compelled to put up with this as the true account of the 
Absolute, whether we choose to give it the title of God or not; nay, 
we shall have perforce to call it God, or else confess that this name 
has nothing answering to it but a baseless figment of fantasy. And 
yet I think it not too much to say, that, while this conception is 
thus made to appear as the only sound result of reason, its real 
meaning is no sooner realized than reason disowns it. By some 
slip, through some oversight, a changeling has been put into the 
cradle of Reason, but Reason, when she sees it, knows that it is 
none of hers. Professor Royce rightly says that it is not the con- 
ception of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. 
For, in very fact, it is not the conception of a being that we can 
adore at all. The fault of it at the bar of the religious reason is, 
that by force of the argument leading to it all the turmoil and all 
the contradictions and tragic discords belonging to experience must 
be taken up directly into the life of the Absolute; they are his 
experiences as well as ours, and must be left in him at once both dis- 
solved and undissolved, unharmonized as well as harmonized, stilled 
and yet raging, atoned for and yet all unatoned. Contradiction is 
thus not only introduced into the very being of the Eternal, and 
left there, but its dialectic back-and-forth throb is made the very 
quickening heart of that being. It is impossible for the religious 
reason to accept this, no matter what the apparently philosophical 
reason may say in its behalf. 

VIII. 

Is there really, then, an impassable chasm between the logical 
consciousness and the religious consciousness? Can the ought to be 
ever yield its autonomous authority to the mere is f — can the mere 



78 BUT THE KANTIAN PREMISE IS NOT UNRESERVEDLY VALID, 

is, simply because it is, — nay, can the must be, simply because it 
must be, — ever amount to the ought to be? Is the religious judgment 
Whatever is, is right, a merely analytical judgment, so that the is is 
right merely because it is, "and the predicate right is merely an idle 
other name for what is already named by its true and best name is? 
Or is it a synthetic judgment, whose whole meaning lies in the com- 
plete transcending of the subject by the predicate, of the is by the 
right, and in the shining of the Rightby its own unborrowed radiance? 
There can be no question how the religious reason will answer. 
And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between 
the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical con- 
sciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state 
the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought. 

And whether this upward and all-embracing reach can be made 
by the logical consciousness, depends entirely — as I said a few 
moments ago — upon whether that fundamental premise brought into 
philosophy by Kant is true or not. If it is true, — if there is no 
knowledge transcendent of sense, and can be none, — then the abso- 
lute Is is tied up in the Being that Professor Royce has described 
to us, and no refuge is left to the unsatisfied Conscience but the 
refuge of faith: the religious consciousness will fain still believe 
though it cannot know, and will maintain a stainless allegiance to 
the City of God though this be a city without foundations. It was 
in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant 
left the human spirit at the close of his great labors. It was the 
only solution left him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of 
knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange 
sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the 
lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all 
experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the 
oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradic- 
tion; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, 
and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely 
avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant's thesis of the im- 
mutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater 
falsehood conveyed by it. And there is a stranger contradiction 
still, between his two main philosophical doctrines — between his 
Primacy of the Practical Reason and his Tra?iscendental Ideality of 
Reason as an account of Nature and of science. Let it be as true as it 



FOR THE VERY VINDICATION OF SCIENCE REQUIRES ITS LIMITATION. 79 

may — and I suppose it is demonstrably true — that a predictive 
science of Nature is impossible unless Nature is construed as strictly 
phenomenal to the cognizing mind and is consequently taken en- 
tirely out of the region of thing s-in-themselves, it by no means fol- 
lows that such a science becomes possible by that supposition alone. 
The withholding of the supposition prevents science; but the great- 
est question is, Can the granting of it establish science ? May not 
far other conditions have to be met, besides the required synthesis of 
sense with Space and Time and the Categories, before we can de- 
clare science to be a real possibility? Or, again, because a concen- 
tration of reason upon its pure sense-forms and their sense-contents 
is prerequisite to science, does it follow that this is sufficient for 
science ? May not the non-limitation of the Categories be requisite 
before science is made out, quite as unquestionably as their concen- 
tration upon perceptions, and even more significantly ? 

Suppose they do have to be " schematized " in Time, or else 
be useless for science: does it follow that they will produce science 
just by being schematized ? — may not an added use of them in an 
utterly unrestricted meaning be needed before we can establish judg- 
ments of absolutely universal and necessary scope over even the 
course of Nature ? But what are the Categories, taken thus without 
restriction, but just the elements of the moral and religious con- 
sciousness ? Kant himself can find no better name for the moral 
reason than Causality with freedom^ nor any fitter name for primary 
creation. In short, the question really is, Can science be shown in 
secure possibility, can the logical consciousness ever reach objective 
reality even in the natural world, without the direct aid of the moral 
and religious consciousness? — without this consciousness adding 
itself into the very circuit of logic, as the completing term by 
which alone the circuit becomes solid, self-sustaining, and incapable 
of disruption ? For if it can, then the asserted primacy of moral 
reason is merely nominal, and only means that moral reason has an 
ideal province of its own, out of all organic connection with any 
world determinably real. But if it cannot, then moral reason is 
really primate, the reality of the scientific thinker as a moral being 
becomes the supreme condition and the demonstrating basis of 
science and of Nature itself, the world of the Vision Beatific be- 
comes the one inclusive all-grounding Fact, and a real God amid his 
realm of real Persons becomes the absolute reality. Kant, in his 



80 THE LOGICAL CIRCUIT NOT COMPLETE BUT BY THE MORAL. 

provisory Thing-in-itself, — set aside as a problem for further deter- 
mination, on the solid psychological evidence that we have not 
within ourselves a complete explanation of sensation, — left open the 
door for answering this question of the total conditions essential to 
science. But he did not use that door. Yet, of course, he could 
not aver that the reality of science was made out, and the order of 
Nature securely predictable, so long as the nature of that co-agent 
Thing -in-itself was undetermined. He also warned the philosophi- 
cal world that there was no secure path to the realm of religion, his 
Realm of Ends, the realm of God and souls, of freedom and im- 
mortality, except by the way of the moral reason. But he made no 
further use of that warning than to declare the absolute autonomy of 
that reason. He should have followed the path he indicated, and 
he would have found in its course the solution for the unknown 
nature of his Thing-in-itself. This would have been done as soon 
as he had noted the gap still remaining in the logic of science, and 
had seen, as he might have seen, that nothing but filling the void 
of the Thing -in-ilself with the World of Spirits, the sum of the 
postulates of the Practical Reason, could close that gap. 

When we shall have gone back to where he paused, and have 
completed the work he left unfinished, then fealty will be translated 
into insight, our faith will have a logical support, our moral common- 
sense will receive its philosophic confirmation, and the reality of the 
World of Persons, and of God as its eternal Fount and Ground and 
Light, will be made out. Then genuine and inspiring religion — the 
religion not of submission but of aspiration, not of bondage but of 
freedom, of Love rather than of Faith and of Hope — will have passed 
from its present stage of anxious conjecture to the stage of settled 
fact. 



DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS. 



For the sake, particularly, of the members of the Union, I may 
here recapitulate my criticisms of the evening's addresses, suggest 
a few others, and hint a little more fully at my own answers to the 
problems discussed, by means of the following questions: 

I. ON PROFESSOR ROYCE'S ADDRESS. 

1. Does a Supreme Being, or Ultimate Reality, no matter how 
assuredly proved, deserve the name of God, simply by virtue of its 
Reality and Supremacy? Is simple Supremacy divine, even if 
made out in idealistic terms — in terms, say, of Omniscience? 

2. Can the attribute of Omniscience amount to a criterion of 
Deity, until we determine the nature of the objects contained in the 
total sphere of its recognition, and find there real persons as the 
supreme and all-determining objects of its view? 

3. To put the preceding question in another way, Can an 
Omniscient Being amount to a Divine Being unless the core and 
spring of this Omniscience be proved to be a Conscience? 

4. Does the argument to an Omniscient Reality from human 
ignorance, taken in its precise reach, provide for persons as the 
prime objects of Omniscience, or for Conscience as its central spring ? 
— does this argument make Omniscience involve Love, in any other 
sense than that of Content with its own action, and with its self- 
produced objects, merely as forms of that action? 

5. Is it reasonable to speak of God as having an experience *, 
even an Absolute Experience? Or, if it is, what change in kind 
in the meaning of Experience is involved? — is not Experience, 
thus taken, a name for the self- consciousness of pure Thought and 
pure Creative Imagination? In the natural and unforced sense of 
the words, can there be an Absolute Experience? — an absolute 
feeling one' s way along tentatively ', or any absolute i. e. wholly 
self-supplied contents received, — facts of sense? 



82 



DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS. 



6. Is the reasoning to an Absolute Experience and an Absolute 
Thought by means of the implications inevitable in asserting our 
limitation to be real, capable (i) of making out an Ultimate Reality 
in any other sense than that of an Active Supreme Judgment as the 
grounding or inclusive being of the single thinker who frames the 
argument; (2) of combining this ultimate reality of this single 
thinker with that of other thinkers equally real? 

7. To put the foregoing question in less cumbrous, though 
less explanatory terms, Can an argument like Professor Royce's 
prove an Absolute Mind distinct from each thinker's mind, or an 
Absolute Mind coexisting with other genuine minds, unquestionably 
as real as itself? What is the true test of reality? — and how alone 
can finitude coexist with unabated reality? Is not the former free 
(i. e. self -active) intelligence? — and, in order to the latter, must not 
Nature be thought as conditioned by human nature, instead of 
conditioning it? 

8. To put the question in still another way, Must not the con- 
vincing force of every such method of reasoning to the Absolute be 
necessarily confined to a Monistic view of existence ? That is, will 
not the method of proof confine us to a single and sole Inclusive 
Infinite Self, and reduce all particular so-called selves merely to 
modes of his Omniscient Perceptive Conception ? Does the argu- 
ment not require us to accept God (so called) as the one and only 
real agent — the vera causa sola? 

9. Is such a view of existence compatible with the true per- 
sonality of human beings, or with a true personality of God ? 

10. What is the real test of personality ? Is it just Self Con- 
sciousness, without further heightening of quality, or must it be 
self-consciousness as Conscieyice? What is Conscience? Is it not 
the immutable recognition of persons — the consciousness of self 
and of other selves as alike unconditional Ends, who thereby have 
(1) Rights, inalienable, and (2) Duties, absolutely binding? 

II. ON PROFESSOR MEZES' CRITICISM. 

I . Is it true that the relativity of pastness and futurity must be 
taken to mean that they are illusions ? Is Csesar really dead and 
turned to clay, and also really, in the one Eternal Moment, now 
conquering Gaul and Britain, and dominating the envious Senate? 



DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS. 



83 



2. Can Eternity be adequately stated in terms of time at all? 
Is there not an Eternal Order, and also a Temporal ? — a Noumenal 
and a Phenomenal ? 

3. Must the ideal being answering to the moral conception 
contain the trait of progressive improvement? Is not this the 
characteristic of minds marked with finitude? — that is, having in 
their consciousness an aspect that is finite ? 

III. ON PROFESSOR LECONTE's ADDRESS. 

1. Does Dr. LeConte's argument to God from the footing of 
science show that there is & Cosmic Consciousness, or only that 
there might well enough be such a Consciousness ? 

2. Is not a Cosmic Consciousness, reached by such an argu- 
ment {if reached by it), necessarily to be taken as having a Monistic 
relation to the Cosmos ? Does not its Omnipresence, too, take the 
form of a universal pervasion of Space as well as of Time? — and 
is there any meaning in the statement, taken literally, that a Mind 
pervades Space, and fills Time? Besides, in the strict sense, has 
Space any extent to be pervaded, or Time any duration to be filled ? 

3. Is such a doctrine of the ' ' Divine Immanence in Nature ' ' 
compatible with the real freedom of human beings ? If not, does 
it leave such beings truly real? Does it not make the so-called 
God the sole real agent? If so, does it not make a Moral Order 
impossible ? 

4. Can a Being without a Moral Order and a moral govern- 
ment — that is, without associates indestructibly free — be a person 
at all? — much more, an Infinite Person, a God? 

5. Can God, the Ideal of the Reason, the Being whose essence 
is Moral Perfection, be adequately conceived as being immanent in 
the creation, or as having the creation immanent in him, if this 
be taken to mean, in the one case, pervasively present and directly 
active within the entire creation, and, in the other case, directly 
embracing or enfolding it in his own life ? 

6. In what sense, only, can God rightly be said to be im- 
. manent in his creation? — is it not in this, that his Image, his nature 

or kind, not his own Person, is ever present there, as the effective 
result of his Creative Omniscience, so that his creation, too, in its 
inclusive unity, proceeds of itself as well as He ? 



8 4 



DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS. 



7. Can a process of evolution, through nature and in time, 
possibly give rise to a being really free, and personally immortal ? — 
to a creation indeed self -active > and therefore indestructible? 

8. Is an evolutional origin of man, then, compatible with a 
Divine creation ? If so, in what sense of the word Man only ? Is it 
not man the phenomenon merely — the experience- contents, physical 
(governed by Space) on the one hand, and psychical (governed by 
Time) on the other, of the completely real (or noumenal) man who 
is the Inclusive Active Unit that embraces and grounds all its being 
in its own active self-consciousness ? — in short, just the human body 
and the human states of mind? 

9. What can the fact be, that has caused so many of the promi- 
nent minds of our time to stumble at the notion of an Infinite Person, 
as involving a self-contradiction? — is it not the difficulty of reaching 
the true conception of Real Infinity ? 

10. Ought we not to discriminate between two vitally different 
meanings of this ancient word Infinite? — which is primary and 
determinative, and which only derivative? Is not every Person 
infinite in this first and profound sense? 



PHILOSOPHICAL UNION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 



THE 

CONCEPTION OF GOD: 

AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNION 

BY 

JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., 

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY. 
TOGETHER WITH 

COMMENTS THEREON 

BY 

SIDNEY EDWARD MEZES, Ph.D., 
HEAD OF THE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, 

JOSEPH LeCONTE, M.D., LL.D., 
PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 

AND 

G. H. HOWISON, M. A., LL.D., 
MILLS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SAME. 



BERKELEY: 
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE UNION, 
I8 95 . 



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